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- typo_kign
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Member for 10 years and 29 days
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Jun 11, 2015
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cbgirardo posted a message on [Primer] MonoU Tron - "The well-oiled machine"U tron beats both other tron decks pretty consistently. Run some Chalices and Jester's Cap+Pithing Needle also help. Squelch is great too.Posted in: Control -
Jan 1, 2015
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crel posted a message on SCG Preview - Monastery MentorI wonder if they're a little worried about this card now. At the time it was in development, Delver wasn't running rampant in multiple formats. I think a lot people could tell from the beginning that Young Pyromancer was a little nuts, but the true extent of it wasn't really seen until Khans and specifically Treasure Cruise. Now they're giving us access to Pyros 5 through 8. It might shift the Delver decks toward the slower Dig Through Time builds that some already favour. The Elemental tokens already take over games and the Monks are much more deadly. They're also potentially more resilient, given they're only one instant away from ducking Electrickery; two away from ducking Pyroclasm.Posted in: The Rumor Mill
Speaking of the tokens, hopefully they print something else that makes them. People are going to need a lot of them. I've seen more people pull a Sorin, Solemn Visitor from a pack than his Vampire token. Even the emblem seems to pop up with more frequency. I think I saw maybe one or two Kiora, the Crashing Wave Kraken tokens in BNG. Thanks to Vanguard of Brimaz, there were plenty of Cat Soldiers. The fact that the token is keyworded is pretty important. If people use dice to represent these tokens - and they will - bad times will be had by people who forget or miss the prowess on them. I'm not sure that, flavourfully, the students needed prowess or that if they did they couldn't have been 0/1 prowesses without ruining the card competitively and creatively.
In any case, on a personal level, I hate this card. It's such an obvious cash grab. The power level of Khans was subtle enough that there were people on here who thought the only good cards in it were the fetches. You were able to preorder a lot of the cards for pretty reasonable prices. The power level in this set so far seems to be about as subtle as a prowess pumped swift kick to the jaw. I hate it when they use Mythic Rarity as a Spike tax. It seems like the fate of my wallet is to be reforged with a lot less money in it. - To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
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They're basically uncommon in power level, but the fact that two different spells exist on one card is what makes it rare. You still can only cast them in order, but if you wanted to add both spells to the same deck it would eat up twice as many slots. The question is do you actually *need* both.
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Also, I'm still of the opinion that Talisman's are helpful if not outright necessary enough to keep mainboarding, and have found that two is the right number (three is too many, and one is pointless).
Finally, is there an argument to be made for just sending Platinum Angel to the side? It's dead before it hits the ground in anything in Jund or Abzan colors, and even worse, exiled by most things in white. The best matchups for it are blitz decks like Infect, Burn, or Affinity, which don't have a game 1 answer to it, but the Angel making an actual difference in those matchups relies in the improbable circumstance of either opening with or drawing it in the first couple of turns and having enough mana to cast it. Yes, it's largely our only line of defense against those decks, but I feel like I'd rather refine the deck overall than to include a single card that makes almost no difference against many archetypes, and has an unlikely chance of showing up in the archetypes against which she's relevant. It seems to me that she's best when backed up by Chalice of the Void, and I feel as though if you're not mainboarding Chalices you probably shouldn't mainboard the Angel either.
There's a lot of game-state factors involved in that decision, and I've done one or the other based upon those wildly differing factors. In general I prefer to Remand before I condescend, as doing it in the reverse order often sinks all your mana into one Counterspell. I especially rely on Remand if they can't recast the spell on the same turn and if I have Thirst For Knowledge with enough mana to cast it, which lets me Remand, draw a card, and then Thirst EOT; at that point you've just gone four cards deep and are well into the driver's seat by the time you untap. You also need to sometimes pair Remand and Condescend together in order to answer a re-castable threat you don't have enough mana to just straight-up Condescend, which revolves Remand for two mana, and then Condescend for usually 1 or 2 when they try to recast.
That said, there's also times when your opponent is either at or ahead of you on land drops, and if they're trying to resolve a serious problem for you and you have an opportunity to counter it with Condescend, you probably should before they can afford the X.
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Way too many individual points to address in one post, so I'm just going to focus on what seems to be the basis behind most others: RG Tron's consistency. It's consistent at being explosive, which means it generates 7-8 mana and lands a top of the curve finisher often while their opponent's are just beginning to assemble their gameplan, but it doesn't need to be explosive against us because they know their threats, in addition to being much more powerful than ours, can wreck us on cast triggers alone, and they have all the time in the world to get there because Mono-U Tron tries to play out over the long game. How many times has your opponent said 'cast trigger' while you're gripping Remand, Repeal, or even a hard counter like Condescend? You're in trouble no matter what.
If you want a recent-ish example of why we have such a hard time playing our game against RG, look at how Esper Dragons faired off against Eldrazi Ramp in standard: it just has no game. Esper can't control cast-trigger ramp, especially in the long game and when those cast triggers (now) exile one of their lands. Their only hope is to slam a turn five Ojutai and hope they can ride it out ahead of Ulamog. Not exactly Esper's usual game, but you can't play your usual game when it's doomed to failure: you have to scramble for your outs and end the game fast as you can. Their 'I play Infinite Obliteration' is our 'I play Spreading Seas;' you need to draw it, you're dead without it, and even then you're still dead in one or two other ways.
So you can Remand all the Sylvan Scrying you want, Repeal all the Chromatic Stars you want, and you can even slam a Chalice on 1 and have a perma-counter for all those one mana ramp spells: it's not going to make a difference, RG Tron always has inevitability over us in the long game unless their natural draws suck or we Slaver lock them before they get out of control. If you counter their ramp spells and their draws are really bad, you can sometimes get their with Wurmcoil or Sundering Titan, but I can tell you the one thing a RG Tron player is happiest to see is when their opponent goes turn 1 Island into Expedition Map. If they go off early, they win. If we try to go long, they win. Anyone who claims to have an amazing matchup against RG Tron is either facing bad opponents or just deluding themselves.
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I'm also not sure what the consensus on Collected Company is, and my opinion may be against it, but I can't say I agree that this is a favorable match for us: instant, EOT spells in creature heavy decks have always been serious problems for control decks in every format, as countering an EOT Collected Company is essentially tapping on your own turn, and that's to say nothing of the existing creature threats that have been on the field for the first three turns and beating you down up until then. It's one of those decks that can play in two different ways and will beat you on whichever line you lack the resources to deal with.
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A banned Splinter Twin, cool cool that's much better than Damnation.
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At the same time, it could have far too much of a game 1 advantage against decks that have no mainboard answer, and the range of anti-Twin tech in the sideboard was always an issue, forcing players to build sideboards with cards that had relevance to only one deck. But then again, how 'limited' is the range of Twin hate when every third match was Twin? Tough call, one that I'm sure Wizrds has been wrestling with for years, and they may or may not have made the right one.