I did. Very unimpressive. The only way to make it good is to discard it to exactly a Liliana trigger, which is not very reliable to set up (don't want 4 copies of priest in the deck). I don't subscribe to the "4cc is too much" circle jerk, but she is kind of clunky to get going. Overall, there are better things one can be doing in that slot and if chipping damage is what you're after, then I think my favourite Mogis, God of Slaughter does that better. Also in general, the whole madness thing isn't great for 8Rack. There are only so many cards you can play and if you are enabling madness, there are better things to be doing than Bloodhall Priest (such as the Lighning Axe I mentioned back then).
That being said, she is interesting. If there is any amount of pressure leading up to a Priest turn, she can close out the game relatively smoothly. But 8Rack puts so little pressure on the opponent that these situations are very hard to come by. Still, the shell allows her to go unchecked (except by topdecked removall) and close out the game very fast. If somebody wants to explore that space it might be worth it.
New damnation doesn't prevent us from doing things the following turn, only from untapping lands. We can still Fatal Push, Dismember, IoK, Crime, Thoughtseize, use Lili etc. You basically wait for them to over commit then punish them for it. Decks where we want this type of effect would be Eldrazi, Affinity, small zoo, merfolk, tokens, green ramp, elves, probably even a few others.
Another thing to keep in mind is we aren't paralyzed prior to casting this. 8Rack is well positioned to set them up for a Last Reckoning blowout. ie a few turns attacking their hand encourages them to dump their threats lest they lose them. Just because its 3cc doesn't mean we HAVE to cast it on turn 3, that's just one option. The critical part of this card is that 3cc IS within our curve, and 4cc is not. A savvy 8Rack player could make good use of this tool.
If you can't untap lands, you can't "still Fatal Push, Dismember, IoK, Crime, Thoughtseize". If you have the mana to do so, then you would've had the mana for a Damnation anyway, which is not only a strictly better clear but also nets you 4 more mana since you can use all of your lands on the following turn.
Hot on the wheels of destroying your own lands and discarding your own cards, 8Rack players now want to start timewalking their opponents in addition to that.
Now a bit more seriously - it might be fine if you are facing a field of swarming decks because it's so ridiculously underpriced, but you have to keep in mind that they will get an additional turn to reload and you can do nothing about it. Triggers and things like Liliana are great, but you need to be able to cast your removal and discard spells. The card is borderline unplayable most of the time, it's just too big of a downside. In order for it to be better than -2/-2 to all creatures it has to hit big things... aggro decks don't play big things and if you are playing this card against a midrange or a control deck you will lose... by a rough estimate... somewhere around 100% of the games you cast it.
There is not deck that wants "as little exposure as possible". We want the most people playing and refining the deck as humanly possible. Sideboards already can't fit hate against all of the relevant things right now, you are worried they are suddenly going to start bringing in hate against 8Rack? Please.
Surgical Extraction is the cherry on top of our discard sundae. I don't think it is necessary to list all of its virtues once again on the site, but I do believe it is more tha graveyard hate. I run it main in a very similar deck to Xaricore's list (above). Let's talk about it in the main 60, since public opinion is that it is not impactful enough for a spot there.
Changing their early game with a thoughtseize/SE T1 is great and when you get two cards from their hand this way, or the one card their whole deck depends on, you will love it even more. Not everybody cares, but an early SE also forces them to play around the loss of their card(s), affecting the rest of the game too.
My favorite part of it is it's ability to effect their top decking, 8rack's nemesis. SE in conjunction with our vitual lack of creatures (turning off their creature kill cards) can make many of their draws lackluster.
I also love how it kills graveyard decks.
I have always said that Surgical Extraction is basically maindeckable, in terms of what it does. I've certainly played with configurations that had it in the starting 60 and it was fine. The problem with this card is that although it's great against 50% if the field, it's also very bad against the other 50%, making it a very ineffective maindeck choice because, assuming you draw it instead of another card, you begin the match with a loss, 50% of the time. It's much better if you know it's good and then side it in.
Time for another meta post. As some of you may have noticed, 8Rack got moved from Developing Competitive to Tier 2 (Modern, of course). So, that happened. I'm not sure exactly when the tiers were updated (although this change suggests it was soon) and I don't know the exact numbers which pushed the deck to tier 2 but there we have it.
The other thing is a quick update planned for the front page. I don't know how many people care, but I planned to feature another decklist (which did very well in SCG Opens by @Moonglow), but after he made a lengthier post explaining his thought process I decided against doing that (there were a lot of factors involved, the least of which was that post). Tom Ross' list still seemed like the best candidate, but now I am looking at doing something else. I want the introductory decklist to represent what the entire 8Rack community thinks is best. Now keep in mind, this list that we are going to feature is not the most tuned to deal with the current meta, it's not the ideal candidate to take down a GP and it's not the pinnacle of 8Rack - it's supposed to be a clean build that's designed to showcase exactly what 8Rack is - a mono-black discard deck, first and foremost. With this in mind, I am hereby asking everybody who wants to participate to submit a decklist within the next week (end date: May 8th, 2017) and then I will put a poll up on the top so anyone can vote on what they think best represents the ideal 8Rack. I'm looking for mono-black builds with lots of four-ofs and without meta tech choices/considerations. I think there is plenty of room to showcase all sorts of decks, from competitive or meta-specific builds to two- or three-coloured versions, but the showcase deck has to be something that a player completely new to 8Rack looks at and says "cool, got it, that makes sense". At least those are my two cents on the matter, if you disagree I'm open to discussion.
Another thing that I planned to do was update our sideboard guide which is in a really bad shape right now (direct port from the previous primer). The reason that didn't happen is because our own @Timba wrote a pretty good, but rather concise, sideboard guide and posted it here a little over a month ago. I approached him and asked if he was interested to write a bit more extensive version that not only shows the choices but also the reasoning behind them, seeing that he is a very competent and successful 8Rack pilot. He was unavailable for the duration of a week at that time. I was hoping he would come out and do it but seeing as that's not the case, I will be working on that for the next week. It's easy to assume he has simply forgotten about it, but I can't know what happened so I'm not judging. It is what it is, I apologise for the delay, we will have a good sideboard guide soon.
The biggest problem I have had with this deck(speaking from playing older versions) I can empty their hands in a hurry but I cant stop them from blowing me out with top deck draws. I don't think the deck can be built in anyway to stop that. This deck does have some really good matchups against certain decks though.
Typically if I have a Rack or two out and we're in a top deck contest that's a good thing for me.
Chances are that if he plays something he's taking 6 next upkeep, rinse and repeat unless he draws a card that fills the hand. With my deck, there's a good chance I'm going to topdeck removal before his one creature can kill me or he dies from the racks. Where there is a problem is when you play a deck that has a lot of draw or when Elves play Lead the Stampede. But generally, topdecking should be a good thing for 8 Rack.
Topdecking and being Hellbent are two very different things. We want the opponent to have 0 cards in hand when his turn starts, ideally. Cool. (There is also some stupid myth floating around that the 8Rack player also wants to have no cards in hand but that's just stupid) Meanwhile, "topdecking" means the act of blindly drawing a singleton card from your deck, most commontly because you have entered the Draw step of your turn. Technically, both players start topdecking on turn 1 (except for the playre going first, of course). The two often get intertwined in most player's minds but this is a misconception. What they mean when they say "topdecking" is when a player has entered "topdeck mode", in which they no longer have cards in their hand (meaning they are already hellbent) and no additional way of generating resources, basically praying to the RNG gods that their deck provides them with a "live" draw (a card that does something, as opposed to most lands). In this scenario they are not in control of which card they draw and are hoping for the so-called "rip". However, while most often used that way (incorrectly so), topdecking does not mean they are already hellbent - it's simply the act of blindly drawing a card from your deck.
In the same vein, 8Rack does not like topdecking because it's intended and built to interact primarily with the cards in the opponent's hand and the vast majority of that interaction is at sorcery speed. You should be unhappy every time the opponent topdecks something because that means half of your deck (more if you count lands) do absolutely nothing to the topdecked card. If it's a creature, then it can be eater by whatever limited removal the specific list currently has available to them, but that's it. 8Rack can't deal with topdecked cards and instead relies on developing it's own plan while disregarding them completely, most commonly in the form of putting down Racks that can race whatever the opponent topdecks. The way you "interact" with topdecked material is the consolidation prize that if they play it you now deal an additional point of damage per Rack. Yay.
What do you think about playing 8-Rack in a team unified tournament? It's the deck which I feel more confortable with so it would be my choice 90% sure, but I have zero experience in this kind of tournament:
I think these decks should be the most popular:
- GB (Jund, Abzan, Death's Shadow...)
- Tron
- Affinity
- Ad-Nauseam
So I think Smallpox version is better than Ensnaring Bridge version, perhaps including Ghost Quarter somewhere in the maindeck over some Mutavaults.
Should I consider something special for maindeck or sideboard? This is the list I'm going to test.
Open Heart
1B
Sorcery
Uncommon
Target opponent reveals his or her hand. You choose a nonlegendary, nonland card from it. That player discards that card.
Horrible. Bad on rate (2 mana for 1 card) and while the restriction might not seem too prohibitive at first, at the end of the day you are playing a Thoughtseize that's twice as expensive and sometimes doesn't even work the way you'd want it to.
Update: It's called Lay Bare the Heart and as an upside to this card it has one of the best, most bad-ass, fully awesome names a Magic card has ever had. So there's that. 100% auto-include in your deck if you shout the name of the cards as you play them, Yu-Gi-Oh!-style.
People were playing 4 Smallpox maindeck and claiming it was good when Dredge was the best deck in the format, this should tell you enough about their perception of the card and that you won't scare them with silly Collected Company decks. I think somebody who is playing the card "BB: Accelerate Dredge's gameplan and delay your own" in a meta that was Dredge's ***** won't stop doing it against decks that actually want their lands and creatures. Besides that, killing a mana dork is not all that bad. They play them for a reason and they would very much like for the dorks to stay alive, sometimes even more so that a 3-drop. It feels correct to "take the play" in general because you are a Thoughtseize deck and I would be hard pressed to find a better turn 1 play than Thoughtseize in the entire game of Magic outside of some specific cases... and Vintage (even there it's sometimes correct). Edit: And by Thoughtseize I mean any card that does relatively the same thing - IoK, Therapy, etc. (but not Probe because it doesn't take the card away)
That being said, she is interesting. If there is any amount of pressure leading up to a Priest turn, she can close out the game relatively smoothly. But 8Rack puts so little pressure on the opponent that these situations are very hard to come by. Still, the shell allows her to go unchecked (except by topdecked removall) and close out the game very fast. If somebody wants to explore that space it might be worth it.
Hmmmmm? She seems interesting, you say?
If you can't untap lands, you can't "still Fatal Push, Dismember, IoK, Crime, Thoughtseize". If you have the mana to do so, then you would've had the mana for a Damnation anyway, which is not only a strictly better clear but also nets you 4 more mana since you can use all of your lands on the following turn.
Now a bit more seriously - it might be fine if you are facing a field of swarming decks because it's so ridiculously underpriced, but you have to keep in mind that they will get an additional turn to reload and you can do nothing about it. Triggers and things like Liliana are great, but you need to be able to cast your removal and discard spells. The card is borderline unplayable most of the time, it's just too big of a downside. In order for it to be better than -2/-2 to all creatures it has to hit big things... aggro decks don't play big things and if you are playing this card against a midrange or a control deck you will lose... by a rough estimate... somewhere around 100% of the games you cast it.
I have always said that Surgical Extraction is basically maindeckable, in terms of what it does. I've certainly played with configurations that had it in the starting 60 and it was fine. The problem with this card is that although it's great against 50% if the field, it's also very bad against the other 50%, making it a very ineffective maindeck choice because, assuming you draw it instead of another card, you begin the match with a loss, 50% of the time. It's much better if you know it's good and then side it in.
The other thing is a quick update planned for the front page. I don't know how many people care, but I planned to feature another decklist (which did very well in SCG Opens by @Moonglow), but after he made a lengthier post explaining his thought process I decided against doing that (there were a lot of factors involved, the least of which was that post). Tom Ross' list still seemed like the best candidate, but now I am looking at doing something else. I want the introductory decklist to represent what the entire 8Rack community thinks is best. Now keep in mind, this list that we are going to feature is not the most tuned to deal with the current meta, it's not the ideal candidate to take down a GP and it's not the pinnacle of 8Rack - it's supposed to be a clean build that's designed to showcase exactly what 8Rack is - a mono-black discard deck, first and foremost. With this in mind, I am hereby asking everybody who wants to participate to submit a decklist within the next week (end date: May 8th, 2017) and then I will put a poll up on the top so anyone can vote on what they think best represents the ideal 8Rack. I'm looking for mono-black builds with lots of four-ofs and without meta tech choices/considerations. I think there is plenty of room to showcase all sorts of decks, from competitive or meta-specific builds to two- or three-coloured versions, but the showcase deck has to be something that a player completely new to 8Rack looks at and says "cool, got it, that makes sense". At least those are my two cents on the matter, if you disagree I'm open to discussion.
Another thing that I planned to do was update our sideboard guide which is in a really bad shape right now (direct port from the previous primer). The reason that didn't happen is because our own @Timba wrote a pretty good, but rather concise, sideboard guide and posted it here a little over a month ago. I approached him and asked if he was interested to write a bit more extensive version that not only shows the choices but also the reasoning behind them, seeing that he is a very competent and successful 8Rack pilot. He was unavailable for the duration of a week at that time. I was hoping he would come out and do it but seeing as that's not the case, I will be working on that for the next week. It's easy to assume he has simply forgotten about it, but I can't know what happened so I'm not judging. It is what it is, I apologise for the delay, we will have a good sideboard guide soon.
Thank you for your time.
Topdecking and being Hellbent are two very different things. We want the opponent to have 0 cards in hand when his turn starts, ideally. Cool. (There is also some stupid myth floating around that the 8Rack player also wants to have no cards in hand but that's just stupid) Meanwhile, "topdecking" means the act of blindly drawing a singleton card from your deck, most commontly because you have entered the Draw step of your turn. Technically, both players start topdecking on turn 1 (except for the playre going first, of course). The two often get intertwined in most player's minds but this is a misconception. What they mean when they say "topdecking" is when a player has entered "topdeck mode", in which they no longer have cards in their hand (meaning they are already hellbent) and no additional way of generating resources, basically praying to the RNG gods that their deck provides them with a "live" draw (a card that does something, as opposed to most lands). In this scenario they are not in control of which card they draw and are hoping for the so-called "rip". However, while most often used that way (incorrectly so), topdecking does not mean they are already hellbent - it's simply the act of blindly drawing a card from your deck.
In the same vein, 8Rack does not like topdecking because it's intended and built to interact primarily with the cards in the opponent's hand and the vast majority of that interaction is at sorcery speed. You should be unhappy every time the opponent topdecks something because that means half of your deck (more if you count lands) do absolutely nothing to the topdecked card. If it's a creature, then it can be eater by whatever limited removal the specific list currently has available to them, but that's it. 8Rack can't deal with topdecked cards and instead relies on developing it's own plan while disregarding them completely, most commonly in the form of putting down Racks that can race whatever the opponent topdecks. The way you "interact" with topdecked material is the consolidation prize that if they play it you now deal an additional point of damage per Rack. Yay.
So you're not going to play another deck with black and instead play 8Rack as one of your team's decks? That doesn't sound like a winning strategy.
Horrible. Bad on rate (2 mana for 1 card) and while the restriction might not seem too prohibitive at first, at the end of the day you are playing a Thoughtseize that's twice as expensive and sometimes doesn't even work the way you'd want it to.
Update: It's called Lay Bare the Heart and as an upside to this card it has one of the best, most bad-ass, fully awesome names a Magic card has ever had. So there's that. 100% auto-include in your deck if you shout the name of the cards as you play them, Yu-Gi-Oh!-style.