Not sure if this fits here, but I'm playing Grixis Moon lately. Sort of a mashup of Blue Moon, Grixis Control, and "Rat Moon" or whatever they're calling it nowadays.
Been playing it for 3-4 months now, have a little bit of tweaking to go still but I like where it's at. Haven't tried playing with Opt yet, but I'm going to be testing a 2/2 split with Serum Visions and see where it goes. Serum Visions is still the better on turn 1, but mid to late game I'd much rather have a higher impact draw right now than next turn, as you need to keep the pressure up before they can get out from under Blood Moon.
i play the Pyro-Prison deck from the deck-creation thread. Lots of Blood Moons, Chalices, and Ensnaring Bridges.
I guess I just love prison decks and the weird board states they create. The tension of 'will they topdeck the relevant removal (which in game 1 sometime just doesn't exist) or will they just lose to Chandra, Torch of Defiance'? And overall the deck has been good to me.
Plus I play a lot of EDH in a casual meta where prison is just not an option, good to get my kicks in this format
Interested in your Grixis deck there Fortunex, if you've got a list would be cool to see
My list at the time of posting was something like:
Since then, I've moved away from delve altogether. I found that the deck could set up a lock but invested too many resources into those threats to close the game out quickly enough.
I'm still working on the list and updating it every week. Lilianas make mana a little weird sometimes, but usually still okay. Pack Rat and Rabblemaster both take over a game very quickly on their own and are hard to deal with when under constrained resources, unlike Tasigurmag. Also, the list doesn't run any counterspells, so having some threats that don't just get 1-for-1'd is important. I'm moving far enough away from blue that straight B/R is a consideration, which would allow me to run Ghost Quarters or Tec Edges in place of Spreading Seas for targeted land hate, which opens up a few slots.
I'm playing a homebrewed Grixis Moon-style deck. Spreading Seas, maindeck Blood Moon, and Stone Rain.
People play very greedy manabases in Modern. Even midrange or control decks are running as few as 2-3 basics total, not to mention the combo decks that need nonbasics to function (Scapeshift, Ad Naus, Tron). Because of that, mana denial feels like a very effective control strategy, and I think that Grixis is a good shell for it. I get to strip their hand of their early plays or sideboard outs and shut off or restrict their ability to play threats while playing my own.
And I get to play some of my favorite cards like Keranos, Rise//Fall, and Snapcaster Mage.
You can't cast Snapcaster'd cards for free with As Foretold. Alternate costs and all that.
Played versus a list running As Foretold. The card is backbreaking if allowed to tick up. Lets you Ancestral Vision, cantrip, or cast removal for free early on and leave mana open for counterspells. Late game, free Cryptic Commands are sweet.
Obviously not very effective versus decks that win on turn 3 or 4 though.
Part of it I guess is that people don't seem able to assess the strength of cards anymore, ever since Prossh, Derevi, so on. Bruse Tarl, Kraum, Tymna, Kydele, Silas Renn and Vial Smasher are, in my view, at least as strong as any single comparable commander currently available for their colors. And Thrasios, Reyhan, and Tana offer some interesting potential, if built around. The rest aren't as remarkable, but they're certainly worth a free card.
You're right that it would probably be a bad move to include a Grizzly Bears in that spot. But if the opinion is that these Partner generals aren't ever worth the mana spent to cast them, then that is probably coming from players who rarely play out their General in any deck, or many creatures for that matter. I know actually a lot of EDH players that just rarely play out their Commander, no harm there. But for those of us who build decks that use the General early and often, these are literally doubling up the available material to work with there.
I disagree quite a bit with your evaluation of the new commanders. And you're including ones that don't have a matching partner in the same colors, which means you'd also be building a 3 or 4 color deck just to have an extra mediocre card in "hand"?
I'm not saying that the partner commanders are bad by any means. But if, for example, you're building a Reyhan deck, and actually focusing on using her ability, why would you include Ikra Shidiqi? Even if lifegain was something you wanted to do, there are better ways to do it that also synergize with the rest of the deck. I would rather have 99 good cards + Reyhan than 98 good cards + Reyhan + Ikra.
Why is everyone nergasming over the partners? The partners are crap and should only be put in the 99. There is no reason to play Ikra and Ishai over Atraxa. You want 4 colors, play one of the four colored generals or don't play 4 color.
Vial is the only one that is viable and he is fine on his own, no need for extra colors.
If you had your pick between starting with 8 cards and starting with 9, which would you pick?
Me, I can't see going with one general again, except for a really strong commander, a combo piece, or some very specific synergy. Other than for fun, ofc.
I see this rhetoric repeated everywhere, and I don't really understand it. Why would you use a deckslot so that you can have an extra bad card with minimal deck synergy in your hand? Many of the generals don't actually have very good synergy with eachother, and of the ones that do, few are good enough to even be worth playing.
It seems like a way to get Maren online extremely quickly. Assuming no other ramp, you can cast HS turn 2, turn 3 cast Maren and a 1 drop that makes another token (Blisterpod, Tukatongue Thalid, Hangarback Walker), get two experience counters, end step return it to the battlefield for a total of 4 XP counters (or 3 with HBW) on turn 3.
Late game you don't really want it around because you wanna be producing tokens with Hornet Queen, Mycoloth, etc., so it might just be too situational. In a deck focusing on reanimating fatties rather than value creatures though, it seems a good way to accelerate your game plan.
I've been playing her as a dredge/toolbox commander with a "combo" kill. She feels a little slow out of the gate to go full reanimator - you aren't getting a huge dude into play very quickly with this deck. She's more of a super grindy value-based commander.
A card that I haven't seen people mention yet that's doing a lot of work for me is Mind Slash. Effective way of dealing with board wipes, hosers, etc. before people get a chance to play them - and it gives you XP counters and whatever other bonus effects you get from creatures dying. Bane of Progress has also been great.
I picked up the Izzet and Golgari decks for a Commander 2015 release tournament my shop put on, lent out the U/R and played B/G myself. In my 4-man pod, it ended up 3v1 against me starting on turn 3 or 4. I still ended up almost winning. The deck out-of-the-box performs very well. I've since made some fairly substantial changes to the deck, throwing in a dredge theme, adding more sac engines and token producers, and removing some chaff. This deck is going to be a very fun project.
I don't think I'll ever really try to tune the U/R one, I'm gonna keep it janky, inconsistent, and fun, and just throw in some of my favorite spells.
I'm still playing with 3x Abbot and 3x Jace. I think Abbot is better in a grindier meta where you're able to really get the most value out of him. Problem is, the meta nowadays is pretty big on Burn, Infect, Affinity, and other linear strategies, and having a 2-drop that you don't want to cast until turn 4 is pretty mediocre against those types of decks. It doesn't matter how much value you get when you're dead before you can cash it in.
To fight these types of decks, I feel like we need to drop Abbots in favor of either instant speed interaction or more solid mid-game threats like Young Pyromancer or Pia and Kiran Nalaar.
I used to play something similar, but I also included Silver-Inlaid Dagger, as Delver, Stalker, and Snappy are all humans. I found it more consistent than Runechanter's Pike personally, but I didn't have quite as many instants or sorceries (I was ~22).
If you are on a counter magic more controlling version then Keranos is a definite possibility. I agree if you only have one Liliana in the 75 then it does make a lot of sense to play the Keranos since he is a wincon on his own he is great against the slower decks in the format. I have considered the switch myself but I am actually holding on to the Liliana probably more out of personal bias towards Liliana than any other tangible reasoning. Keranos main isn't something I have ever been a huge fan of but in this deck I think it could be very strong definitely stronger than having a single Liliana in the 75. Let us know how it goes having jace and keranos side by side is just card advantage for days.
Why do you think that Keranos is better in a counterspell/non-Lily list? To me it seems to work pretty well with Lili, forcing your opponent to discard any answers they may have had, and then drop Keranos and grind 'em out with that inevitability. It's not like a counterspell, where you need to keep it in your hand to be any use. My main argument against playing Keranos is that you really don't want to hit it off of Abbot.
Your jank will not consistently crush competitive decks in this format. If it did, people would be playing that over Jeskai Black, Atarka Red, and GW Megamorph.
If you think you're somehow "better" than competitive players because you play a brew rather than netdeck, that's fine, but if you want to seriously compete, you'll have to ditch that mindset, or you're going to be one step behind everyone else. You are not a better deckbuilder than the dozens of pro players and hundreds/thousands of other people that contribute to a top 8 decklist.
I think it's also kind of silly to say that competitive players don't "think for themselves" if they netdeck. It takes a serious amount of thought and analysis of the meta, each deck's strengths and weaknesses, etc. to determine what deck you should play.
While I'm somewhat skeptical about the land destruction deck -- it does make some sense that it can beat Abzan or GW, but it doesn't seem very likely that it could beat RG or even Jeskai-X decks (incidentally someone at FNM was trying to play land destruction and I VW'd into 4 of their LD spells and left them with 2 lands, was fun) -- and I also don't have particular objections to net-decking, the attitude expressed in your post is one that's arrogant, defeatist, and one which seems unlikely to ever lead to success at the highest levels.
One of the key skills required to compete at a high level in this game is being able to brew, particularly in response to a meta. You see this at every pro-tour, when there are at least a couple teams that get a leg up by creating new decks instead of evolving what was already there. This latest pro tour witness the relative success of Sam Black's Retreat to Emeria deck, which, despite having very few players playing it, earned three of them 24 points which suggests that it's quite decent against some portion of the meta.
If you understand a particular meta you can replicate these same kinds of successes and get ahead of the game when netdecking would otherwise leave you a step behind. Building your own deck is not inherently building "jank." If you take the time to build reasonable decks yourself (with or without the help of the Internet) you can frequently be 80% of the way to the next big thing before there's even an article on it. You can even use the same techniques to enhance or twist a known deck in unexpected ways. Even doing something as simple as listing cards that are particularly good against various decks and then finding the overlap can lead you into something new. On top of all this, playing a non "meta" deck very frequently gives you an edge against opponents who won't know what you're doing or how best to interact with it, something you give up when playing a mostly stock list. While I don't think playing tuned stock lists is bad, especially when you have lots of experience with a particular deck, I think it's wrong to discount and dismiss brewing.
On another topic the elephant in the room nobody's addressing is this notion that you can play "anything" at FNM. Every FNM I've ever been to is more than half made up of people who not infrequently play at PPTQs or other "competitive" events. Nearly 60% of any given FNM field is running a top deck from a GP, Pro Tour, SCG event, etc. You must be able to beat these decks with your brews. But even more so, there's no room for sleeving up cards that just "fun" on their own and going to FNM unless you want to end up 0-4. I know players who do this and they are getting driven out of the game.
This standard format seems likely to be particularly unfriendly to these kinds of players (want to cast Eldrazi, goblins, etc., keep going 1-3 or worse, and eventually decide to quit since paying $40 for Gideons seems crazy -- remember $40 for cardboard only seems reasonable to you because you've already drunk the coolaid, it will never make sense to new players who feel like every FNM they're subsidizing people who just pay more than them to begin with).
Arrogant I'll agree with, but I don't think the attitude was at all defeatist or unlikely to lead to competitive success.
Deckbuilding is an invaluable skill, even on its own, but more importantly, being able to put together a successful brew is a sign that your ability to evaluate cards (in a vacuum, as a part of a deck, and in the meta), construct manabases, find interactions, etc. are all on point.
My post was not in any way trying to hate on homebrews or say that people shouldn't do it. I've been playing nothing but brews in standard for years. I'm currently playing a Jund homebrew that I've been working on for months. My post was meant to give a bit of a reality check to a person who was (probably) a bit too high on his deck because he hosed his friends, with a poor attitude towards netdecking.
To quote Patrick Chapin's book, “if you aren’t at least 25% brew, you’ve got no heart. But if you aren’t at least 25% netdeck, you’ve got no brain.”
Regarding playing anything at FNMS - I think it depends highly on your store/area. If you're near a big city that regularly hosts GPs, PTQs, SCG Opens, or things like that, it's going to be far more competitive. My store is fairly small, but only ~30 minutes from Vancouver BC, and I'd agree with the 60% estimate. But if you drive a couple of hours out of town, you get to the point where you've got to travel for a few hours to make it to a PTQ, and then people get a lot less competitive.
Playing in Maple Ridge BC, I see Abzan, UR Twin and Delver, Burn, Burn, Burn, Bogles, Burn, Lantern Control, Burn, Living End, Amulet Bloom, Burn, and a couple of homebrews.
Hey guys, normally delver player branching out to more Grixis decks. Just a few questions: how come most of you run some amount of liliana of the veil (main board or sideboard)? It seems like a bad combination with countermagic and the cards in the deck don't seem nearly as powerful as jund/ks cards, so it would seem like we would want to keep card advantage available if we face a deck like that. Did a little bit of testing, and Jace is a powerhouse, especially alongside grim lavamancer and an unflipped Jace. Any general tips though about the deck I should know? The sequencing seems similar to the chapin control list and the delver lists, but Jace just adds a new spectrum to it all.
Generally, you play either Lili + Abbot or countermagic. When you side one in, you side the other out. Both are situationally good, just depends on the matchup. Some people like the counterspells, I'm only playing 2x Dispel in the side and that's it - I might switch them out for Remands though. Bouncing spells back to their hand isn't nearly as bad when you can just make them discard it.
The deck functions at sorcery speed much more than most Delver or control lists. It feels weird to tap out in a blue deck, but you have to get the most out of your early turns.
1x Blood Crypt
4x Bloodstained Mire
4x Island
1x Mountain
4x Polluted Delta
1x Scalding Tarn
1x Steam Vents
4x Swamp
1x Watery Grave
Creature (8)
1x Goblin Rabblemaster
1x Jace, Vryn's Prodigy Flip
1x Keranos, God of Storms
4x Snapcaster Mage
1x Young Pyromancer
3x Fatal Push
2x Kolaghan's Command
2x Lightning Bolt
1x Shadow of Doubt
2x Terminate
Sorcery (11)
1x Dreadbore
2x Inquisition of Kozilek
1x Rise // Fall
4x Serum Visions
3x Thoughtseize
Enchantment (7)
3x Blood Moon
4x Spreading Seas
Planeswalker (1)
1x Chandra, Torch of Defiance
1x Anger of the Gods
1x By Force
3x Collective Brutality
1x Damnation
1x Echoing Truth
1x Izzet Staticaster
1x Kolaghan's Command
1x Pyroclasm
2x Rakdos Charm
2x Stone Rain
1x Surgical Extraction
Been playing it for 3-4 months now, have a little bit of tweaking to go still but I like where it's at. Haven't tried playing with Opt yet, but I'm going to be testing a 2/2 split with Serum Visions and see where it goes. Serum Visions is still the better on turn 1, but mid to late game I'd much rather have a higher impact draw right now than next turn, as you need to keep the pressure up before they can get out from under Blood Moon.
My list at the time of posting was something like:
1 Blood Crypt
1 Watery Grave
1 Steam Vents
5 Island
1 Mountain
3 Swamp
4 Polluted Delta
4 Bloodstained Mire
1 Scalding Tarn
2 Tasigur, the Golden Fang
1 Gurmag Angler
4 Snapcaster Mage
1 Keranos, God of Storms
Planeswalkers (1)
1 Chandra, Torch of Defiance
Enchantments (7)
4 Spreading Seas
3 Blood Moon
Instants (13)
4 Thought Scour
2 Terminate
3 Fatal Push
1 Dismember
1 Lightning Bolt
2 Kolaghan's Command
4 Serum Visions
4 Inquisition of Kozilek
1 Dreadbore
1 Rise // Fall
Since then, I've moved away from delve altogether. I found that the deck could set up a lock but invested too many resources into those threats to close the game out quickly enough.
Current list is something like:
1 Blood Crypt
1 Watery Grave
1 Steam Vents
5 Island
1 Mountain
3 Swamp
4 Polluted Delta
4 Bloodstained Mire
1 Scalding Tarn
4 Snapcaster Mage
1 Keranos, God of Storms
2 Pack Rat
2 Goblin Rabblemaster
Planeswalkers (3)
1 Chandra, Torch of Defiance
2 Liliana of the Veil
Enchantments (7)
4 Spreading Seas
3 Blood Moon
2 Terminate
4 Fatal Push
3 Dismember
1 Kolaghan's Command
Sorceries (10)
4 Serum Visions
4 Inquisition of Kozilek
1 Dreadbore
1 Rise // Fall
I'm still working on the list and updating it every week. Lilianas make mana a little weird sometimes, but usually still okay. Pack Rat and Rabblemaster both take over a game very quickly on their own and are hard to deal with when under constrained resources, unlike Tasigurmag. Also, the list doesn't run any counterspells, so having some threats that don't just get 1-for-1'd is important. I'm moving far enough away from blue that straight B/R is a consideration, which would allow me to run Ghost Quarters or Tec Edges in place of Spreading Seas for targeted land hate, which opens up a few slots.
People play very greedy manabases in Modern. Even midrange or control decks are running as few as 2-3 basics total, not to mention the combo decks that need nonbasics to function (Scapeshift, Ad Naus, Tron). Because of that, mana denial feels like a very effective control strategy, and I think that Grixis is a good shell for it. I get to strip their hand of their early plays or sideboard outs and shut off or restrict their ability to play threats while playing my own.
And I get to play some of my favorite cards like Keranos, Rise//Fall, and Snapcaster Mage.
Played versus a list running As Foretold. The card is backbreaking if allowed to tick up. Lets you Ancestral Vision, cantrip, or cast removal for free early on and leave mana open for counterspells. Late game, free Cryptic Commands are sweet.
Obviously not very effective versus decks that win on turn 3 or 4 though.
I disagree quite a bit with your evaluation of the new commanders. And you're including ones that don't have a matching partner in the same colors, which means you'd also be building a 3 or 4 color deck just to have an extra mediocre card in "hand"?
I'm not saying that the partner commanders are bad by any means. But if, for example, you're building a Reyhan deck, and actually focusing on using her ability, why would you include Ikra Shidiqi? Even if lifegain was something you wanted to do, there are better ways to do it that also synergize with the rest of the deck. I would rather have 99 good cards + Reyhan than 98 good cards + Reyhan + Ikra.
I see this rhetoric repeated everywhere, and I don't really understand it. Why would you use a deckslot so that you can have an extra bad card with minimal deck synergy in your hand? Many of the generals don't actually have very good synergy with eachother, and of the ones that do, few are good enough to even be worth playing.
It seems like a way to get Maren online extremely quickly. Assuming no other ramp, you can cast HS turn 2, turn 3 cast Maren and a 1 drop that makes another token (Blisterpod, Tukatongue Thalid, Hangarback Walker), get two experience counters, end step return it to the battlefield for a total of 4 XP counters (or 3 with HBW) on turn 3.
Late game you don't really want it around because you wanna be producing tokens with Hornet Queen, Mycoloth, etc., so it might just be too situational. In a deck focusing on reanimating fatties rather than value creatures though, it seems a good way to accelerate your game plan.
A card that I haven't seen people mention yet that's doing a lot of work for me is Mind Slash. Effective way of dealing with board wipes, hosers, etc. before people get a chance to play them - and it gives you XP counters and whatever other bonus effects you get from creatures dying. Bane of Progress has also been great.
I don't think I'll ever really try to tune the U/R one, I'm gonna keep it janky, inconsistent, and fun, and just throw in some of my favorite spells.
To fight these types of decks, I feel like we need to drop Abbots in favor of either instant speed interaction or more solid mid-game threats like Young Pyromancer or Pia and Kiran Nalaar.
I like the list. Looks pretty good.
Why do you think that Keranos is better in a counterspell/non-Lily list? To me it seems to work pretty well with Lili, forcing your opponent to discard any answers they may have had, and then drop Keranos and grind 'em out with that inevitability. It's not like a counterspell, where you need to keep it in your hand to be any use. My main argument against playing Keranos is that you really don't want to hit it off of Abbot.
Arrogant I'll agree with, but I don't think the attitude was at all defeatist or unlikely to lead to competitive success.
Deckbuilding is an invaluable skill, even on its own, but more importantly, being able to put together a successful brew is a sign that your ability to evaluate cards (in a vacuum, as a part of a deck, and in the meta), construct manabases, find interactions, etc. are all on point.
My post was not in any way trying to hate on homebrews or say that people shouldn't do it. I've been playing nothing but brews in standard for years. I'm currently playing a Jund homebrew that I've been working on for months. My post was meant to give a bit of a reality check to a person who was (probably) a bit too high on his deck because he hosed his friends, with a poor attitude towards netdecking.
To quote Patrick Chapin's book, “if you aren’t at least 25% brew, you’ve got no heart. But if you aren’t at least 25% netdeck, you’ve got no brain.”
Regarding playing anything at FNMS - I think it depends highly on your store/area. If you're near a big city that regularly hosts GPs, PTQs, SCG Opens, or things like that, it's going to be far more competitive. My store is fairly small, but only ~30 minutes from Vancouver BC, and I'd agree with the 60% estimate. But if you drive a couple of hours out of town, you get to the point where you've got to travel for a few hours to make it to a PTQ, and then people get a lot less competitive.
Generally, you play either Lili + Abbot or countermagic. When you side one in, you side the other out. Both are situationally good, just depends on the matchup. Some people like the counterspells, I'm only playing 2x Dispel in the side and that's it - I might switch them out for Remands though. Bouncing spells back to their hand isn't nearly as bad when you can just make them discard it.
The deck functions at sorcery speed much more than most Delver or control lists. It feels weird to tap out in a blue deck, but you have to get the most out of your early turns.