in my experience, you just want to land a relic or two and play the waiting game. don't let them flashback anything. most control lists run roughly 4-8 (usually 6) hard counters in the MB, some of which may even be conditional like countersquall. if they can't flashback, they can't answer all our threats, as we usually run 12ish. some of which may be eternal scourge's which couldn't care less about being countered.
their spell snare are close to useless against us, most of our threats are capable of ending the game by themselves once they get onto the board, their threats tend to be VERY easy for us to answer (with T2 Tasigur as a notable exception), remand and leak are garbage come late-game. we hold a ton of inevitability in the match, let them resolve sphinx's revelation for 6 they're gaining 6 life and grabbing a handful of useless spells.
agree except on reckoner, he just controls the board all by himself without trouble, his only weakness is 'dies to most removal'. and against most aggro decks, that removal tends to be damage based, which leads to us 2-for-1ing them and recovering tempo.
i will admit it's not the best card vs control, mostly because it's just not necessary in that particular MU. there's not usually a difficult or complex board presented by your opponent. just some snaps, manlands, and the occasional tasigur or something. so if i have something to bring in and i need room, yeah i'll side teh reckoners out. but i don't feel like they're costing me the MU. i still steamroll most control w/ 4 reckoners main.
kargan dragonlord is another turn 6 kill in the same vein as FoD. but you only need 2 (R-producing) lands to make it happen. SSG makes it a t5 kill with only 2 lands. additionally, if you are lucky enough to hit all your land drops up until t5, a bolt will kill that turn w/o needing an SSG.
kargan + all land drops + koth is also a t5 kill.
a 3-land dragonlord puts out 15 damage by turn 5, same as goblin rabblemaster. but a 4-land dragonlord puts out 17 damage by turn 5, which is lethal against most decks.
as an added bonus, an 8/8 flampler can contest the board pretty well.
rabblemaster is still probably the better pick for two reasons, it goes wide by itself, & it requires no additional investment beyond its casting cost.
but the main point is this, how does firedrinker satyr even begin to compare to dragonlord? let alone the rabblemaster.
My experience with Grixis is we either crush them or get crushed: there is no middle ground. I really like Roast in this deck. It is the only way to kill large Goyfs on turn 2-3, and Bolt won't do it if the graveyard lacks instants (Fetch, Thoughtseize, take a noninstant nonsorcery, and now Bolt is useless against it). Relic can shrink it down, but Roast is still pretty solid. Good work out there! Is maindeck Molten Rain a meta choice or just some tech? How has Commune worked out for you?
i very rarely ever feel like i need roast vs BGx. relic does the job well enough if you're smart about it. i.e. bolt a 2/3 goyf, it becomes a 3/4 and survives, target yourself with relic to exile bolt and goyf dies. and if it does get a little bigger than you might like, skred usually gets it taken care of early enough for it to not cost you too much life, and if it can't, then pop the relic.
maindeck molten rain is to punish people who play around blood moon. you can easily stop a player with a board of all basics from being able to cast a large number of cards with a good molten rain. also hits man-lands which takes some stress off our other removal spells in a couple MU's. good at sniping that 1-of basic that's letting your opponent breath under moon. generally slows down a few decks, namely eldrazi decks. and can push a little bit of burn to your opponent's face in a pinch. not amazing in any one place, but it's surprising how rarely it feels dead. still, might cut a couple for something like scourge if i can get over it being an eldrazi.
1-of commune feels pretty good. pretty good chances to draw it if a game goes long. whenever a game turns into top-deck wars it can either single-handedly end the game (against BGx and other mid-range strategies) or force a counter at EoT, opening the way for an unanswerable threat (against control). doesn't do much against aggro, tempo, burn, or combo; but aggro, tempo, and burn are already well enough under control that an errant 1-of isn't going to get me killed most of the time.
memory fuzzy, was very tired.
match 1 win vs doran midrange. 2-0
they have the capacity to overwhelm with high toughness creatures, but if they're relying on doran to 'animate' them, then we really only have to kill one creature. and that's more or less how it broke down G1, G2 he had his assault formation in play, but just didn't have a fast enough clock and i outraced him.
match 2 win vs naya zoo. 2-1
he takes game 1 with a pretty solid opening, i had a chance to win but threw any possibility of a win with some back-to-back greedy plays. games 2 & 3 he lost to my sideboard.
match 3 win vs naya burn. 2-0
sinch game 1 in a race that left me at like 3 life iirc. game 2 my sideboard has him locked out of the game on t4 with me still at 10 life.
match 4 loss vs eldrazi tron. 0-2
got some closer games than i expected, both were decided by a top-deck smasher. felt bad, but it's an unlikely match to win anyway. all stars were molten rain and reckoner.
match 1 win vs jund. 2-0
i kept the GY clean both games (not that he found any goyfs anyway) neither game was even that close. my removal just did a significantly better job than his did ultimately.
the first game he stripped my hand with 3 back-to-back discard spells, fortunately i was hitting mainly jets so i just shot them at his face and set up some good top-decks that helped keep him off the board. he did manage to discard my chandra ToD though. eventually i hit a moon followed (6 lands later) by a stormbreath. i had the mana to play and monstrous the stormbreath both in the same turn, bblowing out his double-bolt response and hitting him for 9 to kill him.
the second game played out largely the same, except this time he had a PnK + newLili to try and pressure my targeted removal. it managed to kill my koth after koth put in 8 damage of his own to his face. i found an anger for his PnK, then assembled the burn to kill him from there while a reckoner held the ground.
match 2 win vs grixis delver. 2-0
it's a delver list. again i cannot stress how difficult it is for us to lose this MU. i was stuck on 2 lands for 5 turns game 2 with mostly 3 drops and higher stuck in my hand. he had spent the entire game fetching basics to play around moon and building a respectable board. hit my third land and played a fallout, clearing his entire board. next turn molten rained his swamp, he had no counters left for it as he'd spent the early game protecting his board from skreds and such. next two turns were boil into blood moon. he had several turns of nearly free reign to try and kill me and the game ended with most of his lands and all his creatures dead with a blood moon locking down the rest. now, granted, he didn't exactly have 'the nuts' but he certainly wasn't hurting for better top-decks either.
also he was a salty stan.
match 3 win vs jund. 2-0
so between matches 2 and 3 i had a discussion with a couple other players regarding skreds MU vs other fair decks, mainly jund. they seemed to think jund was favored. my match 3 opponent didn't.
game 1 was surprisingly close, i didn't find any relics and i drew both my moons after he'd already found all his basics. all the same i managed to win the damage race with exact lethal thanks to sarkhan blanking his last removal spells. he did eventually kill the sarkhan with creatures, soaking up some crucial damage. but on my last turn to live with him at 5 life, i jetted him in the face at upkeep and found the bolt i needed to finish the job.
game 2 i blood mooned him.
match 4 draw vs grixis control. 0-0-1
this was a split in record only. we still played it out for fun. he managed to win two very close games. we talked about it afterward and i said the matchup might actually favor him. he flatly denied this saying he won off a string of perfect top-decks both games. either way, they were both nail-biters and a blast to play.
if you want to know what happened, both games he got t2 tasigur with a back-up in hand. some other ***** happened too, but that was the most impactful part of each game, was me having to 2-for-1 myself to stabilize the board 2 times both games. i really don't want to run roast though
maybe he's right and it was just a fluke, and i shouldn't go and try to shoehorn uneeded cards in.
"Fool your picking apart one very minor part of the argument"
yes i am, overall. but in context im picking apart 1 of the 2 points in favor of rocks over jet that you provided. if you provided further agruments, then perhaps i would've provided a more diverse defence. further, i conceded the point that it works well with PnK, because it's true, i'm not trying to say there's no good reason to run rocks. im going after the part of the argument that doesn't work. if somebody comes to this forum looking for help building skred for themselves, and they're debating rocks, they should make the decision based on good information.
"t3 pnk into a t4 koth. It means a t4 stormbreath or GDD"
t3 any blocker into t4 koth performs extremely similarly, pnk is harder to attack through with removal, whereas a non-rock line would have answered any t2 play made by your opponent.
t4 stormbreath performs similarly to t5 stormbreath. the difference between any 2 later turns is always smaller than the difference between any 2 earlier turns, ESPECIALLY in modern.
ditto for GDD unless you're trying to go for a back-to-back molten rain. which is pretty value.
these are fine plays, but not significantly better or worse than non-rock options in the majority of cases.
once again, the two main things that stand out acceleration-wise are t-break and PnK. with new chandra bringing up the rear as an honorable mention. (you can cast more removal of her +1 and she sits much more comfortable at 5 loyalty than 4)
"I understand koth on t3 isn't desirable in some match ups"
forgive me for the semantics, but by 'some' do you mean ~80% or more?
"it's just as likely they have a path as they do a t4 reality smasher maybe more likely."
nearly every single bant eldrazi list i've seen runs 4 smashers. and that's just one of the many creatures koth could be facing, many bant eldrazi lists run less than 4 paths. it is far more likely that t3 koth will be profitable for the eldrazi player than for the reckoner to be profitable for them.
this is only more true in versions of eldrazi that lean closer to tron.
"but the rock is card advantage late game"
no, under no circumstance is rock card advantage. it is most frequently card neutral, assuming you have time to pop it.
"its clearly a staple of the deck"
this is a status quo argument, i agree there's a reason why this is the status quo, but the reasons provided are not the why.
" I am seriously tempted to play 2 spellskites main but that's a favorite card of mine and normally 2 are in all my decks 75."
it's a great card, not nearly as good vs burn as you'd expect in my experience, but helps vs a good number of bad MU's and large metashare decks. fills a similar roll to chalice with different strength's weaknesses.
that said, unless you really have a ton of combo in your meta, or a lot of sub-4-power creatures to block, i don't know if you want em MB. i guess just a meta call there.
"Testing out the pia nalaars they could be new Chandra."
let us know how that goes, but considering it can't acru any card advantage, i doubt it'd be 'the new chandra'
EDIT:
holy ***** skred won a GP. thanks for mentioning that bit i wasnt playing at the time and the news missed me. i got some watching to do.
EDIT 2 electric boogaloo:
so judging by his play at the GP (not understanding how ricochet trap works, not understanding the interaction between chandra ToD and scourge, etc.) i think it's safe to say he's somewhat unfamiliar with the deck. that said, he was clearly doing something right to get the win.
I get with the reckoner plan maybe mind stones aren't your best bet but what list is effective with reckoner atm? I mean really I would much rather have a pnk or koth on t3 then a reckoner against the majority of the meta. The scry on the jets can be very valuable the cards good no question here. I think a lot of this conversation just comes down to play style. Do you have a list your running atm Fool?
PnK is great, but it's just one card, most of the time it functions just as well as reckoner, with the notable exceptions of midrange MU's where it noticably out-performs reckoner. meanwhile reckoner outperforms PnK against the stompy-esc eldrazi decks, and indeed most other stompy decks. there's more midrange than stompy though from my guestemations, but reckoner doesn't rely on rocks to come out t3, or just run both. t3-koth however, nonono.
so looking through all the decks currently listed as tier 1 & 2 on modern nexus (which is slightly out of date but it's the best i have to go off of) there are 6 decks i see that a turn 3 koth would be an above average play against. those decks are Gx Tron (3.8% overall), lantern control (3.1%), titan shift (2.8%), jeskai nahiri (1.7%), titan breach (1.7%), & ad nauseam (1.6%). representing a combined metashare of 14.7%.
despite this, Gx tron remains horribly unfavorable even with the possibility of turn 3 koth while jeskai nahiri & titan shift are already strongly in our favor. accounting for that, t3 koth is helping us against 6.4% of the overall meta. of the remaining decks (sans lantern control), SSG does the same job but better in that it can also provide us with t2 moons/rabblemasters. ofc, SSG has his own problems so that falls to you weighing out those pros and cons, i tend to fall on SSG's side for many reasons but that shouldn't be surprising.
meanwhile, t3 reckoner is a better than average play against 5 decks in tier 1 alone; infect, burn, dredge, affinity, bant eldrazi, representing a combined metashare of 33.5%
immediately im going to remove dredge from the group as there's no way it still hold those numbers, giving us a total metashare of 26.7%
this is all based on the assumption that playing koth into a board with an enemy creature already in play -or- against a deck with reasonable out-of-hand damage is sub-average. i.e. t3 koth vs bant eldrazi just gets eaten by a smasher they play from hand. this also assumes that your opponent spent their t2 developing an unanswered threat if it's reasonable to assume such for the deck in question, i.e. affinity is going to have played more creatures than 1 or 2 (if you animate a mountain and cast a removal spell with it) removal spells can handle.
likewise, this assumes that if your opponent would likely have a way to profitably remove reckoner, then reckoner is a sub-average play.
again, this is with slightly out of date data, i've tried to account for it without getting too speculative. but all the same, reckoner is quadrupling t3-koth's chances of being useful without even accounting for tier 2 decks that reckoner is good against. i doubt the meta has shifted enough for t3-koth to have passed up reckoner.
does this mean that rock is 100% terrible? no, but like i said, im going to point out bad arguments. t3-koth is not why somebody should be playing rocks. it's icing on top at best. you play rocks when your deck runs more 4 drops than is normally healthy, or when you want to help smooth out mana in opening hands and you already have jets, or youjust want a couple more artifacts for some synergy your deck has. i'd say rocks aren't worth it unless your doing some combination of those things, hopefully all of them.
and as for my list, it's a little overdue for a tune-up, im eyeing my molten rains, boils, and maybe a sweeper or two atm.
i want to fit in 1 more stormbreath and some more flexible interaction, but i can't really find exactly what i'm looking for. i definitely don't think 4 angers SB is necessary after GGT ban, 4 d-claws are a must in my local meta of i SWEAR 33% burn, fortunately the claws+chalices+moons do some serious work in that regard. and chalice is pretty useful in a number of other MUs. i want to replace boil with another control stomper, but one that's less potent in exchange for some more flexibility, i really don't think i need much if any SB power for that MU outside of nahiri decks, and even they aren't very threatening. probably e-scourge, but i don't want to run eldrazi, cause they're gross.
magma jet
a reactive play rather than a proactive one yes, but one that makes much more sense with our deck and can help find more than just mana
and if you really just need to find a land or a threat or whatever, but they don't have a creature on board, then just launch it face. better to put 2 damage on your opponent and find another land, than it is to play a rock that can't cast reckoner.
the only mana accelerant that this deck has use for is SSG
but to be clear, that's because i see the main benefit to running rocks to be smoothing mana, not accelerating mana.
unless you run a TON of 4 drops. which i dont think is optimal. but that's another topic and im already talking in circles
sorry if i came off as derisive, i don't mean to, but i don't do a very good job of wording things in text.
again, my issue is that it only really works well with PnK. forcing us to pass up on holding answers on t2, we're a control deck that's our primary objective on the early few turns, hold up answers and prevent the opponent from quickly developing an insurmountable lead on board.
"It's a matter of your build and personal preference."
i've been saying this from the beginning, and maybe im too aggressive in asserting my personal preference on this topic.
but when i see (and i mean no personal offense here) such bad arguments in mind stones favor, im going to point them out.
saying mind stone is a way to smooth out bad hands with one more mana source that can cycle is one thing, i think it makes us worse against aggro decks which isnt worth it considering how prevalent the archetype is but that's a difference of opinion.
but saying mind stone gives us explosive openers with koth is silly in the majority of cases.
if you want explosive openers at the cost of late gme bad draws hurting our midrange and control MU's then run SSG
if you're having trouble with mana in your opening hands, i'd say run more jets, but mind stone can do the job at the cost of hurting our aggro MU's
then you hold up removal t1, play relic/spellbomb t2 while still holding removal, then move to turn 3 to drop what is likely a blocker they can't profitably remove if they're playing aggro.
im not trying to play a t3 koth vs burn or aggro, it's a lightning helix for 4 in the best case, which is nice. but that assumes they don't just ignore koth and kill you, and seeing as it represents an investment of two turns worth of tempo that will likely leave you wide open, you're likely to find yourself in sorry shape come turn 4.
aggro is perhaps the worst example in favor of rocks. its the MU we need to be aggressively fighting to keep them as close to 100% off the board from the word go. we can't afford to spend t2&3 developing a slower & more vulnerable clock than them w/o hampering their plans at all.
the only mana accelerant that this deck has use for is SSG in combo and big mana MU's. getting a t2 moon/rain into a rabblemaster or vice versa is often times our only way to really stand a chance of winning.
rocks are too slow, and the sequence is less secure.
against midrange it's not bad, but it's not good either, it just takes up deckspace until late game comes around and you finally cycle the thing. in the mean time it's been dead weight.
and control MUs are already heavily favored for us across the board, with 1 or 2 (VERY SERIOUS) exceptions like U-tron. we just play the waiting game better than 90% of other control decks.
why not just play your spellbomb or relic on turn 1 or 2? why wait till turn 3? so you can skip the main reason to play t2 ramp? so you can play a stormbreath on t4? is that what we're trying to do?
Ensnaring bridge and ghostly prison, for instance, are redundant.
their spell snare are close to useless against us, most of our threats are capable of ending the game by themselves once they get onto the board, their threats tend to be VERY easy for us to answer (with T2 Tasigur as a notable exception), remand and leak are garbage come late-game. we hold a ton of inevitability in the match, let them resolve sphinx's revelation for 6 they're gaining 6 life and grabbing a handful of useless spells.
i will admit it's not the best card vs control, mostly because it's just not necessary in that particular MU. there's not usually a difficult or complex board presented by your opponent. just some snaps, manlands, and the occasional tasigur or something. so if i have something to bring in and i need room, yeah i'll side teh reckoners out. but i don't feel like they're costing me the MU. i still steamroll most control w/ 4 reckoners main.
kargan + all land drops + koth is also a t5 kill.
a 3-land dragonlord puts out 15 damage by turn 5, same as goblin rabblemaster. but a 4-land dragonlord puts out 17 damage by turn 5, which is lethal against most decks.
as an added bonus, an 8/8 flampler can contest the board pretty well.
rabblemaster is still probably the better pick for two reasons, it goes wide by itself, & it requires no additional investment beyond its casting cost.
but the main point is this, how does firedrinker satyr even begin to compare to dragonlord? let alone the rabblemaster.
i very rarely ever feel like i need roast vs BGx. relic does the job well enough if you're smart about it. i.e. bolt a 2/3 goyf, it becomes a 3/4 and survives, target yourself with relic to exile bolt and goyf dies. and if it does get a little bigger than you might like, skred usually gets it taken care of early enough for it to not cost you too much life, and if it can't, then pop the relic.
maindeck molten rain is to punish people who play around blood moon. you can easily stop a player with a board of all basics from being able to cast a large number of cards with a good molten rain. also hits man-lands which takes some stress off our other removal spells in a couple MU's. good at sniping that 1-of basic that's letting your opponent breath under moon. generally slows down a few decks, namely eldrazi decks. and can push a little bit of burn to your opponent's face in a pinch. not amazing in any one place, but it's surprising how rarely it feels dead. still, might cut a couple for something like scourge if i can get over it being an eldrazi.
1-of commune feels pretty good. pretty good chances to draw it if a game goes long. whenever a game turns into top-deck wars it can either single-handedly end the game (against BGx and other mid-range strategies) or force a counter at EoT, opening the way for an unanswerable threat (against control). doesn't do much against aggro, tempo, burn, or combo; but aggro, tempo, and burn are already well enough under control that an errant 1-of isn't going to get me killed most of the time.
same from last page
19 snow-covered mountain
3 scrying sheets
REMOVAL
4 lightning bolt
4 skred
4 magma jet
3 volcanic fallout
THREATS
4 boros reckoner
3 koth of the hammer
2 chandra, torch of defiance
2 stormbreath dragon
1 sarkhan, the dragonspeaker
4 relic of progenitus
2 blood moon
4 molten rain
1 commune with lava
3 chalice of the void
4 dragon's claw
2 blood moon
4 anger of the gods
2 boil
memory fuzzy, was very tired.
match 1 win vs doran midrange. 2-0
they have the capacity to overwhelm with high toughness creatures, but if they're relying on doran to 'animate' them, then we really only have to kill one creature. and that's more or less how it broke down G1, G2 he had his assault formation in play, but just didn't have a fast enough clock and i outraced him.
match 2 win vs naya zoo. 2-1
he takes game 1 with a pretty solid opening, i had a chance to win but threw any possibility of a win with some back-to-back greedy plays. games 2 & 3 he lost to my sideboard.
match 3 win vs naya burn. 2-0
sinch game 1 in a race that left me at like 3 life iirc. game 2 my sideboard has him locked out of the game on t4 with me still at 10 life.
match 4 loss vs eldrazi tron. 0-2
got some closer games than i expected, both were decided by a top-deck smasher. felt bad, but it's an unlikely match to win anyway. all stars were molten rain and reckoner.
match 1 win vs jund. 2-0
i kept the GY clean both games (not that he found any goyfs anyway) neither game was even that close. my removal just did a significantly better job than his did ultimately.
the first game he stripped my hand with 3 back-to-back discard spells, fortunately i was hitting mainly jets so i just shot them at his face and set up some good top-decks that helped keep him off the board. he did manage to discard my chandra ToD though. eventually i hit a moon followed (6 lands later) by a stormbreath. i had the mana to play and monstrous the stormbreath both in the same turn, bblowing out his double-bolt response and hitting him for 9 to kill him.
the second game played out largely the same, except this time he had a PnK + newLili to try and pressure my targeted removal. it managed to kill my koth after koth put in 8 damage of his own to his face. i found an anger for his PnK, then assembled the burn to kill him from there while a reckoner held the ground.
match 2 win vs grixis delver. 2-0
it's a delver list. again i cannot stress how difficult it is for us to lose this MU. i was stuck on 2 lands for 5 turns game 2 with mostly 3 drops and higher stuck in my hand. he had spent the entire game fetching basics to play around moon and building a respectable board. hit my third land and played a fallout, clearing his entire board. next turn molten rained his swamp, he had no counters left for it as he'd spent the early game protecting his board from skreds and such. next two turns were boil into blood moon. he had several turns of nearly free reign to try and kill me and the game ended with most of his lands and all his creatures dead with a blood moon locking down the rest. now, granted, he didn't exactly have 'the nuts' but he certainly wasn't hurting for better top-decks either.
also he was a salty stan.
match 3 win vs jund. 2-0
so between matches 2 and 3 i had a discussion with a couple other players regarding skreds MU vs other fair decks, mainly jund. they seemed to think jund was favored. my match 3 opponent didn't.
game 1 was surprisingly close, i didn't find any relics and i drew both my moons after he'd already found all his basics. all the same i managed to win the damage race with exact lethal thanks to sarkhan blanking his last removal spells. he did eventually kill the sarkhan with creatures, soaking up some crucial damage. but on my last turn to live with him at 5 life, i jetted him in the face at upkeep and found the bolt i needed to finish the job.
game 2 i blood mooned him.
match 4 draw vs grixis control. 0-0-1
this was a split in record only. we still played it out for fun. he managed to win two very close games. we talked about it afterward and i said the matchup might actually favor him. he flatly denied this saying he won off a string of perfect top-decks both games. either way, they were both nail-biters and a blast to play.
if you want to know what happened, both games he got t2 tasigur with a back-up in hand. some other ***** happened too, but that was the most impactful part of each game, was me having to 2-for-1 myself to stabilize the board 2 times both games. i really don't want to run roast though
maybe he's right and it was just a fluke, and i shouldn't go and try to shoehorn uneeded cards in.
yes i am, overall. but in context im picking apart 1 of the 2 points in favor of rocks over jet that you provided. if you provided further agruments, then perhaps i would've provided a more diverse defence. further, i conceded the point that it works well with PnK, because it's true, i'm not trying to say there's no good reason to run rocks. im going after the part of the argument that doesn't work. if somebody comes to this forum looking for help building skred for themselves, and they're debating rocks, they should make the decision based on good information.
"t3 pnk into a t4 koth. It means a t4 stormbreath or GDD"
t3 any blocker into t4 koth performs extremely similarly, pnk is harder to attack through with removal, whereas a non-rock line would have answered any t2 play made by your opponent.
t4 stormbreath performs similarly to t5 stormbreath. the difference between any 2 later turns is always smaller than the difference between any 2 earlier turns, ESPECIALLY in modern.
ditto for GDD unless you're trying to go for a back-to-back molten rain. which is pretty value.
these are fine plays, but not significantly better or worse than non-rock options in the majority of cases.
once again, the two main things that stand out acceleration-wise are t-break and PnK. with new chandra bringing up the rear as an honorable mention. (you can cast more removal of her +1 and she sits much more comfortable at 5 loyalty than 4)
"I understand koth on t3 isn't desirable in some match ups"
forgive me for the semantics, but by 'some' do you mean ~80% or more?
"it's just as likely they have a path as they do a t4 reality smasher maybe more likely."
nearly every single bant eldrazi list i've seen runs 4 smashers. and that's just one of the many creatures koth could be facing, many bant eldrazi lists run less than 4 paths. it is far more likely that t3 koth will be profitable for the eldrazi player than for the reckoner to be profitable for them.
this is only more true in versions of eldrazi that lean closer to tron.
"but the rock is card advantage late game"
no, under no circumstance is rock card advantage. it is most frequently card neutral, assuming you have time to pop it.
"its clearly a staple of the deck"
this is a status quo argument, i agree there's a reason why this is the status quo, but the reasons provided are not the why.
" I am seriously tempted to play 2 spellskites main but that's a favorite card of mine and normally 2 are in all my decks 75."
it's a great card, not nearly as good vs burn as you'd expect in my experience, but helps vs a good number of bad MU's and large metashare decks. fills a similar roll to chalice with different strength's weaknesses.
that said, unless you really have a ton of combo in your meta, or a lot of sub-4-power creatures to block, i don't know if you want em MB. i guess just a meta call there.
"Testing out the pia nalaars they could be new Chandra."
let us know how that goes, but considering it can't acru any card advantage, i doubt it'd be 'the new chandra'
EDIT:
holy ***** skred won a GP. thanks for mentioning that bit i wasnt playing at the time and the news missed me. i got some watching to do.
EDIT 2 electric boogaloo:
so judging by his play at the GP (not understanding how ricochet trap works, not understanding the interaction between chandra ToD and scourge, etc.) i think it's safe to say he's somewhat unfamiliar with the deck. that said, he was clearly doing something right to get the win.
PnK is great, but it's just one card, most of the time it functions just as well as reckoner, with the notable exceptions of midrange MU's where it noticably out-performs reckoner. meanwhile reckoner outperforms PnK against the stompy-esc eldrazi decks, and indeed most other stompy decks. there's more midrange than stompy though from my guestemations, but reckoner doesn't rely on rocks to come out t3, or just run both. t3-koth however, nonono.
so looking through all the decks currently listed as tier 1 & 2 on modern nexus (which is slightly out of date but it's the best i have to go off of) there are 6 decks i see that a turn 3 koth would be an above average play against. those decks are Gx Tron (3.8% overall), lantern control (3.1%), titan shift (2.8%), jeskai nahiri (1.7%), titan breach (1.7%), & ad nauseam (1.6%). representing a combined metashare of 14.7%.
despite this, Gx tron remains horribly unfavorable even with the possibility of turn 3 koth while jeskai nahiri & titan shift are already strongly in our favor. accounting for that, t3 koth is helping us against 6.4% of the overall meta. of the remaining decks (sans lantern control), SSG does the same job but better in that it can also provide us with t2 moons/rabblemasters. ofc, SSG has his own problems so that falls to you weighing out those pros and cons, i tend to fall on SSG's side for many reasons but that shouldn't be surprising.
meanwhile, t3 reckoner is a better than average play against 5 decks in tier 1 alone; infect, burn, dredge, affinity, bant eldrazi, representing a combined metashare of 33.5%
immediately im going to remove dredge from the group as there's no way it still hold those numbers, giving us a total metashare of 26.7%
this is all based on the assumption that playing koth into a board with an enemy creature already in play -or- against a deck with reasonable out-of-hand damage is sub-average. i.e. t3 koth vs bant eldrazi just gets eaten by a smasher they play from hand. this also assumes that your opponent spent their t2 developing an unanswered threat if it's reasonable to assume such for the deck in question, i.e. affinity is going to have played more creatures than 1 or 2 (if you animate a mountain and cast a removal spell with it) removal spells can handle.
likewise, this assumes that if your opponent would likely have a way to profitably remove reckoner, then reckoner is a sub-average play.
again, this is with slightly out of date data, i've tried to account for it without getting too speculative. but all the same, reckoner is quadrupling t3-koth's chances of being useful without even accounting for tier 2 decks that reckoner is good against. i doubt the meta has shifted enough for t3-koth to have passed up reckoner.
does this mean that rock is 100% terrible? no, but like i said, im going to point out bad arguments. t3-koth is not why somebody should be playing rocks. it's icing on top at best. you play rocks when your deck runs more 4 drops than is normally healthy, or when you want to help smooth out mana in opening hands and you already have jets, or youjust want a couple more artifacts for some synergy your deck has. i'd say rocks aren't worth it unless your doing some combination of those things, hopefully all of them.
and as for my list, it's a little overdue for a tune-up, im eyeing my molten rains, boils, and maybe a sweeper or two atm.
19 snow-covered mountain
3 scrying sheets
REMOVAL
4 lightning bolt
4 skred
4 magma jet
3 volcanic fallout
THREATS
4 boros reckoner
3 koth of the hammer
2 chandra, torch of defiance
2 stormbreath dragon
1 sarkhan, the dragonspeaker
4 relic of progenitus
2 blood moon
4 molten rain
1 commune with lava
3 chalice of the void
4 dragon's claw
2 blood moon
4 anger of the gods
2 boil
i want to fit in 1 more stormbreath and some more flexible interaction, but i can't really find exactly what i'm looking for. i definitely don't think 4 angers SB is necessary after GGT ban, 4 d-claws are a must in my local meta of i SWEAR 33% burn, fortunately the claws+chalices+moons do some serious work in that regard. and chalice is pretty useful in a number of other MUs. i want to replace boil with another control stomper, but one that's less potent in exchange for some more flexibility, i really don't think i need much if any SB power for that MU outside of nahiri decks, and even they aren't very threatening. probably e-scourge, but i don't want to run eldrazi, cause they're gross.
a reactive play rather than a proactive one yes, but one that makes much more sense with our deck and can help find more than just mana
and if you really just need to find a land or a threat or whatever, but they don't have a creature on board, then just launch it face. better to put 2 damage on your opponent and find another land, than it is to play a rock that can't cast reckoner.
but to be clear, that's because i see the main benefit to running rocks to be smoothing mana, not accelerating mana.
unless you run a TON of 4 drops. which i dont think is optimal. but that's another topic and im already talking in circles
sorry if i came off as derisive, i don't mean to, but i don't do a very good job of wording things in text.
"It's a matter of your build and personal preference."
i've been saying this from the beginning, and maybe im too aggressive in asserting my personal preference on this topic.
but when i see (and i mean no personal offense here) such bad arguments in mind stones favor, im going to point them out.
saying mind stone is a way to smooth out bad hands with one more mana source that can cycle is one thing, i think it makes us worse against aggro decks which isnt worth it considering how prevalent the archetype is but that's a difference of opinion.
but saying mind stone gives us explosive openers with koth is silly in the majority of cases.
if you want explosive openers at the cost of late gme bad draws hurting our midrange and control MU's then run SSG
if you're having trouble with mana in your opening hands, i'd say run more jets, but mind stone can do the job at the cost of hurting our aggro MU's
im not trying to play a t3 koth vs burn or aggro, it's a lightning helix for 4 in the best case, which is nice. but that assumes they don't just ignore koth and kill you, and seeing as it represents an investment of two turns worth of tempo that will likely leave you wide open, you're likely to find yourself in sorry shape come turn 4.
aggro is perhaps the worst example in favor of rocks. its the MU we need to be aggressively fighting to keep them as close to 100% off the board from the word go. we can't afford to spend t2&3 developing a slower & more vulnerable clock than them w/o hampering their plans at all.
the only mana accelerant that this deck has use for is SSG in combo and big mana MU's. getting a t2 moon/rain into a rabblemaster or vice versa is often times our only way to really stand a chance of winning.
rocks are too slow, and the sequence is less secure.
against midrange it's not bad, but it's not good either, it just takes up deckspace until late game comes around and you finally cycle the thing. in the mean time it's been dead weight.
and control MUs are already heavily favored for us across the board, with 1 or 2 (VERY SERIOUS) exceptions like U-tron. we just play the waiting game better than 90% of other control decks.
@esdawt
yes it's average cost