Hey guys, made the finals (2nd) of a pptq on counters company. Warning: Article length post ahead:
I've been playing this deck for a year now and have stayed on the top of the leader board at my store with it: eg. https://hobbymaster.co.nz/season/points/3
So I do have a lot of experiences & thoughts to share.
//Sideboard
SB: 1 Auriok Champion
SB: 1 Burrenton Forge-Tender
SB: 1 Gaddock Teeg
SB: 1 Kambal, Consul of Allocation
SB: 3 Leyline of the Void
SB: 2 Maelstrom Pulse
SB: 3 Path to Exile
SB: 1 Reclamation Sage
SB: 1 Sin Collector
SB:1 Worship
My deck is a bit of a mix between the 9th place decklist from gp prague & classic Abzan.
I think after testing that tracker is too good not to play, but feel that having black removal and seer combo/finks stalling power is too useful to stay pure GW.
Here are my thoughts on card choices:
Tracker is 'fantastic', and neccessary in a world where UW exists. It requires a little play style adjustment - it's often better to spend t4 cracking 2 clues instead of casting more stuff.
If you treat it less like a 3/2 with no time to crack instead of a 5/4 suspend that also drew you two cards, it will perform better for you in a lot of spots. But the card is just insane and if you're not playing at least 2 you're doing yourself a disservice. It's much more powerful than bugler - it will win games by itself.
Rhonas, no ballista: Rhonas is a more powerful card. It wins me SO many games that ballista never could and I think it's a mistake not to play it. Leave up activation mana on defense then chord when they either can't attack or rejoice that they used removal on a bad creature: if they don't have an answer they can't attack, making this great on defense.. and it's awesome on offense. You can attack freely with this card and big trackers with trample. Rhonas also makes our bad creatures into good threats- a vizier suddenly attacking for 4 is a big deal that a 2 powered ballista just doesn't have the same impact on. Yes, ballista is a better combo piece, but I prefer to build decks around high card quality and the big death-touch body/ability on the card is much more useful when you don't have infinite mana.
Shalai: Looks medium on paper but I find in testing I am consistently happy to draw it. Hoses on random decks like shift, burn, mill, gifts ungiven and I regularly use it as a chord target to counter settle the wreckage.
Ooze: Bad on turn 2, great on turn 12. Excellent chord target in response to snap. Deserves the main deck slot, good vs random gy decks if they don't nut draw you.
Witness: I like running 3, but needed to make room for tracker. Relying less on the gy has been a boon and witness just doesn't kill people like tracker does.
2 field of ruin: this is pretty free in a deck with this many dorks and it fixes itself for you if needed. Makes the Tron and control matchups way, way better at a low cost. Can randomly screw people off a colour they need or a sideboard splash.
Sb: Auriok champion is good vs mardu, dredge and burn. I was expecting all 3 of those decks.
Forge tender was some more burn hedge and for rg valakut.
Teeg! I'm well aware that this card shuts off chord and coco. It's here for the UW matchup. UW actually doesn't have many outs to teeg, especially when they need to kill shalai first too, which is what I try to assemble. I don't think this plan is amazing, the matchup is horrible, but I believe this to be the best bullet against them.
Kambal: storm/kci are on the down tick lately, this card let's me hedge further vs burn while still having some hate.
Leylines are because I was expecting dredge, which I consider to be a bad matchup. Dark blast and conflagrate are both extremely effective against us and they have more removal for druid after board. I bring this card in vs Jeskai as well because with snap/logic knot / sfa they are now quite gy reliant.
Maelstrom pulse I'll say little about, trophy invalidates the conversation - but decay doesn't kill Teferi/Jace. Pulse fixes target problem.
Finally, worship: go look at all the coco decks that made top 16 in all events in the last year: 90% of them run worship, and that's statistically very interesting, no? Yuya from 9th at Prague ran 3 and praised them very highly.
I think it's meta dependent, but it's also a very, very busted card that will often win an otherwise unwinnable game on the spot that you don't want to ever draw 2 of. For this reason, I think 1 is a very reasonable number.
For the tourney!:
R1 vs Tron: W - g1, druid t3 kill. G3, field of ruin bought time to chord for a late druid and then kill.
R2 vs Mardu pyro - L - I mulled and died mostly.
R3 vs infect - W - won the die roll, race.
R4 vs Jund Shadow - W - lost g1, turned into control deck after board. Didn't ever attack, just drew cards and played removal spells. Fun stuff. Finks was great at stalling here and invalidated a key liliana of the veil.
R5- living end - W: t3 kill g1, leyline g2.
R6: Draw into top 8 at 4-1-1.
T8 mardu rematch: I drew much better and buried him with trackers. Didn't board in leylines, only removal & auriok. Can't dilute deck too much.
T4: BW Eldrazi: G1 loss, wasteland strangler is brutal, dude was good at killing druids. G2 I kept a hand with worship, which completely stole the game. Rhonas plus shalai finished him off while he couldnt damage me. G3 went super midrange - I saw zealous persecution so boarded out all my dorks, then beat him with infinite tracker plus witness value. W.
Finals: Died to UW. G1 I mulled to 5 and got terminused, G2 I made a subtle error that I think cost me the game. At one point in the midgame I cocoed into witness and got back company - but I had a maelstrom pulse I used on SFA in the gy. Creatures matter much less vs UW, and I couldn't kill the Teferi he slammed the next turn. That game went super long and was close, but that Teferi won the game. Vs UW, heed this: their walkers are more powerful than coco, so prioritize killing them over generating card advantage.
On that note, don't be afraid to board out your mana creatures and turn into a slow midrange deck in some matchups (like Mardu, Jund). You have a better late game than they do and a druid is more useful than a hierarch when you are grinding out their removal. This configuration grinds very well and with this much card draw & blocking power, your 5 removal spells go a long way. Moving forward I think I will play 4 trophy & 2 path.
The trick to beating Jeskai and Mardu is voice of resurgence. I play 3 main and they singlehandedly swing both matchups hugely.
I play a value town list but with a very light black splash for finks+viscera seer main and 2x maelstrom pulse in the sb. Pulse kills Teferi and is dead in very few matchups- it is easily the best card in my sb.
By having voice to force a 2 for 1 out of your opponent, it allows you to get that little bit ahead on cards enough to let knight live for a turn, tutor for wolf run, then have that card take over from there.
For Jeskai I still board a thrun even with 3 voice. Thrun is much stronger with kessig wolf run in your deck as it is even harder to stone wall.
A major point for the Jeskai matchup is to sandbag a gq/FoR in your hand if possible so they can't kill it & you can then deploy it to take down a flipped sfa with only one activation ( ideally casting a company etc that turn to tap them out first so they can't).
I've been playing this deck for over a year now and am first on the leader board for my store, so it's been very good to me.
Hey guys!
I would love to write an article on this as I just have a billion thoughts, but have no outlet to do so- I'm hoping someone here will appreciate the read & that we can generate some constructive discussion
Thanks to Pathrogas for all the reads- it is interesting reading through these lists and some of the similarities that come up in all our thinking (Including much not written here- e.g I would love to know more about your thoughts on Maindeck Kambal).
I would like to share my take on the list for discussion, as it deviates in key ways from standard lists I am seeing here. I've been working on and playing this list 3x a week for 3 months and was playing Kiki Chord for around a year before that. I have won a couple of cash/store credit events with this list and earlier variations, so it is performing well.
Here is my list, followed by an explanation of some of the more controversial choices (Barring the sideboard, which I think is covered well
by Jeff Hoogland's recent deck tech at the SCG Player's championship- It was nice validation to see him not only switch to Abzan but to also come up
independently to very similar conclusions sideboard-wise as well- many of the same cards and in close numbers no less.
My variant of this archetype & methodology is more midrange with incidental combo similar to Kiki Chord than say Abzan Company. I dislike the "wrong half of the deck" problems that random low cmc toolbox creatures generate & this deck plays a strong midrange game with a "combo" of "Here's a fast Sigarda or sideboard hate card". I am totally open to discussion on this, as it's completely feasible that it's correct to have a mix of cards
ie 1 fulminator/rec sage main- but I would rather play with generically good cards across a wide variety of matchups- Maelstrom pulse
is much more powerful than reclamation sage mainboard.
Chord of calling is a slow and clunky card that leads to a swift death if you have no board presence and is often still too
slow even if that board presence is building. For this reason I dislike it in the current format compared to Evo- I want the fast hate
& the fast bomb- and that bomb is Sigarda.
I cut Archangel of Thune early on as I found that eldritch evolution does not lend itself well to multi-piece combo decks.
What Evolution does do well is add consistency & speed to finding key cards- The ability against any traditional fair deck in the format to put a Sigarda in to play and have witnesses to recur it is very powerful.
The problem with evolution is card advantage. To make this work, you want to sacrifice cards that have also generated value.
Wall of omens, voice of resurgence and eternal witness all meet this criteria (& to a lesser extent finks, which I favour much less in other archetypes other than as burn hate).
I notice none of the other lists in this thread are running wall of omens. Interesting. I run it as a 4-of and I would rate it as
one of the best possible cards for the archetype- sacrificing it for a 4-drop keeps you at card parity & even against a control deck
that counters your evolution you are at card parity (In the sense that you usually dont care about the 0/4 in the matchup).
Lingering souls fixes the grixis matchup and is also a powerful tool against affinity and infect- this is a major reason to be in Abzan
& compliments the list well- it is also an excellent follow-up to sacrificing a voice of resurgence due to the immediate boost to the token.
Maindeck Thrun is a concession to control & in particular to planeswalkers- if an opponent drops a fast Nahiri, Koth, or Lili of the last hope what I have found is that you need a hexproof, resilient beater that can't be targeted by removal against removal-heavy walker decks to evolve into, otherwise you lose to their ultimates. I do board Thrun out fairly regularly, but he has earned his slot.
3x Rhino-I noticed with this list that games go long- I was winning a surprising number of games with siege rhino triggers. Having 18 points of lifeswing total in grindy fair games is subtly powerful (Plus they beat down very well) & I would be running 4 still if not for the new need for a second Maelstrom Pulse main.
3x Eldritch Evolution- It does seem strange to have an evolution deck that is not running 4 copies. Over many games with this deck
I have found that I was losing games where I drew all my evolutions and had no targets to evolve & that I wanted to evolve a 2 drop
into siege rhino most of the time anyway. Cutting 1 for another siege rhino was a noticeable improvement.
2 Maelstrom Pulse (+1, cutting a rhino recently)- Lantern control is now a staple in my meta. I hate this deck a lot & would like some additional hedge against it. Difficulty with this matchup against a skilled pilot is a key driver for me creating this post.
4x Runed Halo - Now this is the most controversial card choice by far.. Hear me out, this card has been fantastic. This archetype is soft to various forms of combo. How do you beat Valakut decks game one? How do you beat them full stop? Their engine is very difficult to interact with. As an experiment, I mainboarded this card in our GW deck to resolve this issue. Not only did it singlehandedly swing that matchup in my favour (0-2,0-2 to 2-0,2-0), but it has been the most standout impressive card in the list. It is easy to look at this card as a narrow hate card, but in gameplay, it is like a super terminate mixed with a pre-emptive counterspell and the only matchup so far that it is dead in is Tron.
Few decks especially these days run enchantment removal main
& so any creature you name and all future copies become dead cards bar blocking- and your gameplan is to kill them with Sigarda or Lingering souls in the air anyway.
Naming Blighted Agent/Inkmoth nexus is much more powerful than path, and I have been ruining decks like bloo and death's shadow by naming their
signature card (or the flip-side) as well. Key targets: Valakut,Slippery Bogle, Blighted Agent, Inkmoth Nexus, Etched Champion,Tarmogoyf,Liliana of the veil, Thoughtknot seer (Makes this matchup much much better), Reality Smasher, Celestial Colonnade, Lightning Bolt, Eidolon of the great revel (Savage), Borborygmos Enraged, lightning storm, grape shot, insectile aberration, codex shredder the list goes on. I have gotten to enjoy naming a creature already in play, then watch them draw and play 2 more copies of that creature- & watched a goryo's player draw 40 cards and fail to kill me without bricking g1. It's been a good ride & now all the players in my local scene respect this card.
Thanks for reading!
P.S I want to beat the crap out of lantern control, skilled pilot.
Any tips would be appreciated.
I had a play recently with stock Kiki chord blue with 4x Nahiri*, mostly because I wanted to play with nahiri again - boy was it a sharp drop in power - nahiri is clunky to mediocre where company just dominates games.
I strongly recommend to anyone playing stock Kiki chord to play luda's list for a while, company is simply too powerful of a card not to play.
Played some more modern recently, here are
some matches and an overdue list:
Burn:
G1: Won the die roll, chorded for kitchen finks twice & killed him with knight beatdown.
G2: Mull to 5, triple goblin guide start, lose.
G3: Very close game, but cast the same lightning helix 3x off witness and then killed him with knight.
2-1
Grixis Griselbrand:
My nightmare matchup.
G1 he doesnt have a fast hand & bricks pretty hard (rare), so scavenging ooze off Fauna shaman is enough to get me there.
G2 I negated his turn 3 Goryo's vengeance to put Griselbrand into play. I later chorded for witness to get back negate and counter a through the breach Emrakul. When he later passed the turn without doing anything I cocoed into a knight, which I killed him with.
2-0
Grixis Control:
G1 I resolve a turn 2 voice followed by a turn 3 knight. He plays a kalitas, but my knight is a 6/6 at this point so I attack him anyway with exalted.
Knight kills him.
G2: He mulls to 5 & I keep triple voice of resurgence plus lands and path, which gets me there easily.
2-0
Jeskai control:
G1 I am wrathed multiple times by anger and by verdict. At one point I am forced to play a 3/3 knight as I had two in hand, so instead of attacking with it I sac a land, get a fetch and then fetch another land to make it a 5/5.
My board state at this point is voice finks knight hierarch, so he casts anger of the gods. He kills the knight after it has attacked him twice, but it put him under a lot of pressure which allowed me later close the game with another one - mid-game Company into double knight is brutal..
G2 I fulminator him into oblivion and then company multiple times, running him over.
2-0
Infect: 1-2
Killed on turn 2 on the draw both losses & didnt see a path in my mulligans.
Wall of omens is sorely missed here because you dont really want to block glistener elf with fauna shaman. G2 I won with fauna shaman into skite into staticaster.
All in all 4-1 & win on breakers.
Very happy with the current list, barring a noticeably weaker infect MU than I’m used to with a more stock Kiki chord (I’ve since updated my SB to include Melira below).
I have cut Magus of the moon from my current list because there is a high percentage of Grixis and Jeskai in my meta, where that card is not at it's best. Fulminator gets the nod for being good against Tron and Jeskai (It's actually fantastic against Jeskai).
While it's true knight is weak to dedicated graveyard hate (Rest in peace), it depends on what that hate is- the most common answer to Abzan company is Grafdigger's cage, which knight doesnt care about.
I only killed with kiki combo once all night, but that was just the nature of my pairings & my not drawing many chords.
Oh one note for Luda with knight and blood moon effects is that in a game against scapeshift I drew bloodmoon when I had a knight out- I used it to sac a stomping ground, (floating red) to then get a basic and cast that blood moon- Since knight was already a 4/4 at that point and it doesn’t really need to be bigger than that to kill people, the inability to sac more lands was irrelevant and the utility of getting another basic out was actually great. Negate is what got me to that point alive, countering a would-be-lethal scapeshift.
My current list is as follows:
3 Path to Exile
3 Chord of Calling
4 Collected Company
4 Birds of paradise
3 Noble Hierarch
3 Voice of Resurgence
3 Fauna Shaman
1 Scavenging Ooze
1 Spellskite
1 Qasali Pridemage
3 Knight of the reliquary
2 Kitchen Finks
1 Fulminator Mage
3 Eternal Witness
1 Restoration Angel
1 Kiki-Jiki
1 Izzet Staticaster
2 Forest
1 Plains
4 Windswept Heath
4 Wooded Foothills
2 Verdant Catacombs
2 Stomping Ground
1 Temple Garden
1 Horizon Canopy
1 Razorverge Thicket
1 Kessig Wolf-Run
1 Grove of the Burn-willows
1 Breeding Pool
1 Sacred Foundry
I'm still tinkering with the numbers a lot, I like 4 knight and 3 finks but the room is really tight.
Very happy with negate again so far despite reducing creature count.
I suggest testing an idea like that for a solid ten matches bare minimum before raising it on the thread, otherwise & without data it quickly devolves into "I think this would be good" then "No I don't think so"- wasted time that does nothing for our archetype.
A good recent example of this was the bunch of posts dedicated to sin prodder, which has no merit in this archetype.
Also: "No I don't think so".
In a company shell if you were going 4 of that effect it should be pestermite due to the faster, evasive clock - especially considering Kiki combo is dead to bolt anyway- but I don't actually consider this worth testing regardless.
To Luda: Yeah- I cut: 1 finks, 1 phantasmal image, 1 village bell-ringer from your list, for 3 knights.
Finks is great, but both Grixis and Jeskai in my meta run anger- Bell-ringer sucks big-time to draw;
I cut PI because I kept having to coco onto an empty board EOT vs control and having no legal targets for the image- Knight plus nothing is now knight plus knight. While I never minded PI in testing & you get to do some cool things, I always just found I would rather have a knight, particurlarly in a deck with so much 1 into 3 drop acceleration.
I wouldnt run knight in a non-coco shell, being able to hit it + another guy off Coco mitigates the problem where it doesnt generate value on entry because if you coco into knight plus witness, double knight or knight plus voice, your opponent is strained heavily for removal - and this deck casts company multiple times per game.
Playing coco lets us play a much more aggressive gameplan because of noble hierarch exalted and the surprise bash of company- my variant exploits this as it is essentially a hybrid between Kiki Chord and Naya Company.
(I also beat Naya company because finks is so good against them and they can't really tap out against me or I go chord for angel+Kiki)- witness x 3 means I get to coco more too.
There's plenty of jeskai in my meta and I have been crushing them 2-0 every match in the last few weeks because of knight and coco+witness; You strain their removal so heavily & then knight kills them before they can find another answer. The fact that it doesnt die to anger/bolt/helix is a big deal as well & just having it in your deck lets you race opponents like delver because you are just hitting them so hard. If beatdown is too slow like against Tron you can just go for the fauna shaman fulminator-witness plan, which e.g naya coco can't do.
Knight may not fit the "Chord of calling" gameplan, but it really fits the "company" gameplan in a big way- it just kills people. I showed my list to a local Jeskai player who was impressed and annoyed at getting his ass kicked consistently- the first thing he says is “I don’t think you really need knight”.. and then we got paired up for our round and I killed him with one.
I run 10 fetches to facilitate the knight and have actually been finding ghost quarter to be an underperformer because of the opening hands it neuters.
I’ll post a list and some more matches soon, just been very busy.
I have been saying this since my admittedly brash initial introduction into the thread- there are some matchups we can't beat without counters or hand disruption.
This is why I ran 4 negate to good results in the past. Negate x4/Thoughtseize x4 plus witnesses vs e.g Grishoalbrand will buy you a lot of time that would otherwise not be possible because it's so hard to silver bullet that deck.
I came to the conclusion that Thoughtseize is better than negate in most matchups (noteable exclusion is living end, where negate plus e.g rhetoric is excellent- though I also prefer negate vs Tron due to stopping t3 karn on the draw, which is often not possible with unified will in standard Kiki chord.
However, because I'm now ludafishing, negate becomes much more difficult to run due to company's strict deckbuilding restrictions-even though negate is also better here thanks to additional blue mana from hierarch. If I was still on p&k Kiki chord I would run 4 Thoughtseize in the sideboard and I would be heavily experimenting with tidehollow sculler.
But I'm not on p&k because.....
I'm convinced now after a few tourneys that Kiki-Coco is the more powerful deck and it's not close, I have been topping events very consistently with it and smashing the blue decks to boot.
@ my fellow ludafishers, knight of the reliquary has been absolutely awesome.
Against a deck like Jeskai that is bolt/helix/anger.dec, your 6/6 with kessig wolf run's trample will murder them because they already had to path your voice/finks... And you have eternal witness and coco to grind them too.
Naya coco as an aggro deck has consistently put up solid results - the reason for that is the power level of knight of the reliquary in a collected company deck as a 6/6 or bigger 3drop... That can also mana ramp, grow itself and also find the monster of a card that is wolf run.
3-1 tonight, 2-0 x3 followed by a very tight 2-1 match where g1 I got manascrewed and g3 I drew 12 lands, got hallowed moonlighted out of a coco and was still in it, because the card advantage in this build is just that crazy awesome.
Side note : knight fixes the 'my cards that all cost 3 or less are lower impact than 4-5 drop cards' problem that I normally have with coco decks. I attacked a Jeskai player for ten tonight twice with one card and that was game.
I'll concur in my testing that my win percentage dropped when I started doing 4 Nahiri & emrakuling- which is why I'm now Ludafishing.
Had a bad run last night, got turn 3 karned 4x no ***** Hahahaha.. Makes me want to play a deck that just gets dumb free wins like that. Boy do I want Thoughtseize back in my sideboard though.
I'm currently thinking my way back on the sideboard plan - blue vs black- degenerate combo is still a problem for this deck. I don't think 4x slaughter games is the way to go, but I wonder if 4 Thoughtseize (which I think now is better than negate) is a necessary evil against the likes of scapeshift, ad nauseum & grishoalbrand.
Path isn't fantastic against any of these decks barring primeval titan and slimming on those would mean you wouldn't be hurting company as much.
Another option I'm considering for my meta is 1x mainboard Anafenza the foremost because it is a decent beater, strategy hoser and still a hit off coco all while not dying to bolt. It's certainly fine vs Abzan company too for example.
Had a great run with a Ludafish variant of this deck in a competitive modern night at my local LGS going 4-1. Company is a card I've always disliked, but it is simply too powerful not to play... & it's growing on me with some of the stuff this deck does with it!
I did end up cutting bell-ringer after drawing it a few times- I just can't get behind the card.. but phantasmal image and staticaster were excellent in testing.
I also chose to play 62 cards, as I wanted to test rather than cut the wrong card. I would run 62 again.
Round 1 vs Naya Company:
G1 Coco'd turn 3 into eternal witness + phantasmal image targetting witness, returning collected company and path.
Drew Kiki naturally, so a chord for 7 on turn 4 sealed the deal because he tapped out for a mainphase company of his own (trying for exalted).
G2 No coco, but I used fauna shaman to find scavenging ooze to make his knights tiny & then murdered him with mine- two 6/6's do not muck around.
Kitchen Finks was excellent here.
Round 2 vs Jeskai nahiri: 2-0
G1: T2 kitchen finks into t3 knight after making him deal with it made him wrath on his turn 5, but knight did get a hit in thanks to his bolt & spellsnare-heavy hand -
when he wrathed the kitchen finks remnant was given by exalted by 1 hierarch and a pridemage which I dropped- these little exalted guys really wrack on pressure. Killed him with an attack from qasali pridemage when he dealt with everything else.
G2 he just mulliganed into oblivion and a third/uncontested knight chunked him.
Round 3: Grixis through the breach combo. See Kentaro Yamamoto's recent list. 0-2
I hate this list, I have lost to it 3 weeks in a row. Game 1 I died on turn 4 to simian-through the breach Emrakul and game 2 I died on turn '2' to
simian spirit guide/faithless looting goryo's vengeance Emrakul. This matchup is the reason why Pestermite and triple extraction are in the sideboard, but this is a horrible matchup I very much want to fix.
Round 4: Bogles, 2-0
Turn 1 birds turn 2 fauna shaman is awesome. Got a turn 3 spellskite off shaman followed by a kitchen finks off shaman, followed by combo
since he couldnt attack through finks with spellskite taking all future enchantments.
Game 2 was a repeat of the first except I used fauna shaman to get trinket mage and blow all his stuff up, kaboom.
Round 5: Grixis control 2-0
Voice of resurgence & knight of the reliquary ruled both games & I had the path for his Kalitas.
Having a 6/6 for 3 is just great a lot of the time- it has the wall of omens effect where it can block very effectively for you, but it can also just kill people - especially when these delightful little exalted triggers and the ability to go tutor for a wolf-run during a board stall come into play.
All in all this list was a lot of fun to play and felt stronger than previous kiki chord variants I've played- I would pay 4 mana to put a knight of the reliquary into play at instant speed end of turn, so the deckbuilding constraint/drawback with company of being too low to the ground is mitigated somewhat by this card. Phantasmal image helps with this too because
you can steal something sweet of your opponents- I did just end up copying a knight a few times though!
Getting two 5/5+'s off a coco (which I did against Grixis) is just backbreaking.
Hi Luda,
Congratulations on a very respectable result & thanks as always for your quality input.
I echo your thoughts on Fauna Shaman, I’ve recently experimented with cutting it in favour of trying out the 4 Nahiri/1 Emrakul package
& my win percentage has noticeably dropped- I keep having hands with Nahiri where I wish it was Fauna Shaman!!
Nahiri just doesn’t beat degenerate combo like Fauna shaman does & that’s my entire meta right now.
This isn’t to say that Fauna shaman is a better card than Nahiri- & Nahiri “is” fantastic, but it’s interesting that the lists that put up results seem to be of the 2-3 Nahiri variety rather than the 4/Emrakul variety.
All this being said, how were phantasmal image & village bell ringer for you?
My immediate inclination looking at your list is to want to cut both & maybe 1 hierarch and 1 finks in order to put 4 Knight of the reliquary in there.
Knight has consistently impressed me as a very powerful and underplayed card- it is the driving force behind the success of Naya Coco (2 copies in top 8’s at one of the GPs)
& it seems a shame not to abuse it in this naya coco shell as well. The advantage we have over that deck is chordable hate, so the speed/aggression decrease is worth it I think-
but knight is still a very fast clock.
I’d then change 2 township for 1 wolf run and 1 ghost quarter, because 1 ghost quarter is much more consistent with 4 knights and
is a solid additional hedge against Tron particularly when backed with witness chains.
Collected company decks did look good yesterday, but Abzan company is a very different beast.. if only it wasn't so oppressively boring to play. Being able to chord for 1 and seer at instant speed after coco on turn 4 is pretty easy/ common and we just can't match that cheapness.
I've been playing this deck for a year now and have stayed on the top of the leader board at my store with it: eg. https://hobbymaster.co.nz/season/points/3
So I do have a lot of experiences & thoughts to share.
This was my list:
4 Chord of Calling
4 Collected Company
2 Birds of Paradise
4 Devoted Druid
2 Duskwatch Recruiter
2 Eternal Witness
4 Kitchen Finks
4 Noble Hierarch
1 Rhonas the Indomitable
1 Scavenging Ooze
1 Shalai, Voice of Plenty
4 Tireless Tracker
1 Viscera Seer
4 Vizier of Remedies
2 Field of Ruin
4 Forest
2 Gavony Township
2 Horizon Canopy
1 Overgrown Tomb
1 Plains
1 Swamp
2 Temple Garden
3 Verdant Catacombs
4 Windswept Heath
//Sideboard
SB: 1 Auriok Champion
SB: 1 Burrenton Forge-Tender
SB: 1 Gaddock Teeg
SB: 1 Kambal, Consul of Allocation
SB: 3 Leyline of the Void
SB: 2 Maelstrom Pulse
SB: 3 Path to Exile
SB: 1 Reclamation Sage
SB: 1 Sin Collector
SB:1 Worship
My deck is a bit of a mix between the 9th place decklist from gp prague & classic Abzan.
I think after testing that tracker is too good not to play, but feel that having black removal and seer combo/finks stalling power is too useful to stay pure GW.
Here are my thoughts on card choices:
Tracker is 'fantastic', and neccessary in a world where UW exists. It requires a little play style adjustment - it's often better to spend t4 cracking 2 clues instead of casting more stuff.
If you treat it less like a 3/2 with no time to crack instead of a 5/4 suspend that also drew you two cards, it will perform better for you in a lot of spots. But the card is just insane and if you're not playing at least 2 you're doing yourself a disservice. It's much more powerful than bugler - it will win games by itself.
Rhonas, no ballista: Rhonas is a more powerful card. It wins me SO many games that ballista never could and I think it's a mistake not to play it. Leave up activation mana on defense then chord when they either can't attack or rejoice that they used removal on a bad creature: if they don't have an answer they can't attack, making this great on defense.. and it's awesome on offense. You can attack freely with this card and big trackers with trample. Rhonas also makes our bad creatures into good threats- a vizier suddenly attacking for 4 is a big deal that a 2 powered ballista just doesn't have the same impact on. Yes, ballista is a better combo piece, but I prefer to build decks around high card quality and the big death-touch body/ability on the card is much more useful when you don't have infinite mana.
Shalai: Looks medium on paper but I find in testing I am consistently happy to draw it. Hoses on random decks like shift, burn, mill, gifts ungiven and I regularly use it as a chord target to counter settle the wreckage.
Ooze: Bad on turn 2, great on turn 12. Excellent chord target in response to snap. Deserves the main deck slot, good vs random gy decks if they don't nut draw you.
Witness: I like running 3, but needed to make room for tracker. Relying less on the gy has been a boon and witness just doesn't kill people like tracker does.
2 field of ruin: this is pretty free in a deck with this many dorks and it fixes itself for you if needed. Makes the Tron and control matchups way, way better at a low cost. Can randomly screw people off a colour they need or a sideboard splash.
Sb: Auriok champion is good vs mardu, dredge and burn. I was expecting all 3 of those decks.
Forge tender was some more burn hedge and for rg valakut.
Teeg! I'm well aware that this card shuts off chord and coco. It's here for the UW matchup. UW actually doesn't have many outs to teeg, especially when they need to kill shalai first too, which is what I try to assemble. I don't think this plan is amazing, the matchup is horrible, but I believe this to be the best bullet against them.
Kambal: storm/kci are on the down tick lately, this card let's me hedge further vs burn while still having some hate.
Leylines are because I was expecting dredge, which I consider to be a bad matchup. Dark blast and conflagrate are both extremely effective against us and they have more removal for druid after board. I bring this card in vs Jeskai as well because with snap/logic knot / sfa they are now quite gy reliant.
Maelstrom pulse I'll say little about, trophy invalidates the conversation - but decay doesn't kill Teferi/Jace. Pulse fixes target problem.
Finally, worship: go look at all the coco decks that made top 16 in all events in the last year: 90% of them run worship, and that's statistically very interesting, no? Yuya from 9th at Prague ran 3 and praised them very highly.
I think it's meta dependent, but it's also a very, very busted card that will often win an otherwise unwinnable game on the spot that you don't want to ever draw 2 of. For this reason, I think 1 is a very reasonable number.
For the tourney!:
R1 vs Tron: W - g1, druid t3 kill. G3, field of ruin bought time to chord for a late druid and then kill.
R2 vs Mardu pyro - L - I mulled and died mostly.
R3 vs infect - W - won the die roll, race.
R4 vs Jund Shadow - W - lost g1, turned into control deck after board. Didn't ever attack, just drew cards and played removal spells. Fun stuff. Finks was great at stalling here and invalidated a key liliana of the veil.
R5- living end - W: t3 kill g1, leyline g2.
R6: Draw into top 8 at 4-1-1.
T8 mardu rematch: I drew much better and buried him with trackers. Didn't board in leylines, only removal & auriok. Can't dilute deck too much.
T4: BW Eldrazi: G1 loss, wasteland strangler is brutal, dude was good at killing druids. G2 I kept a hand with worship, which completely stole the game. Rhonas plus shalai finished him off while he couldnt damage me. G3 went super midrange - I saw zealous persecution so boarded out all my dorks, then beat him with infinite tracker plus witness value. W.
Finals: Died to UW. G1 I mulled to 5 and got terminused, G2 I made a subtle error that I think cost me the game. At one point in the midgame I cocoed into witness and got back company - but I had a maelstrom pulse I used on SFA in the gy. Creatures matter much less vs UW, and I couldn't kill the Teferi he slammed the next turn. That game went super long and was close, but that Teferi won the game. Vs UW, heed this: their walkers are more powerful than coco, so prioritize killing them over generating card advantage.
On that note, don't be afraid to board out your mana creatures and turn into a slow midrange deck in some matchups (like Mardu, Jund). You have a better late game than they do and a druid is more useful than a hierarch when you are grinding out their removal. This configuration grinds very well and with this much card draw & blocking power, your 5 removal spells go a long way. Moving forward I think I will play 4 trophy & 2 path.
I play a value town list but with a very light black splash for finks+viscera seer main and 2x maelstrom pulse in the sb. Pulse kills Teferi and is dead in very few matchups- it is easily the best card in my sb.
By having voice to force a 2 for 1 out of your opponent, it allows you to get that little bit ahead on cards enough to let knight live for a turn, tutor for wolf run, then have that card take over from there.
For Jeskai I still board a thrun even with 3 voice. Thrun is much stronger with kessig wolf run in your deck as it is even harder to stone wall.
A major point for the Jeskai matchup is to sandbag a gq/FoR in your hand if possible so they can't kill it & you can then deploy it to take down a flipped sfa with only one activation ( ideally casting a company etc that turn to tap them out first so they can't).
I've been playing this deck for over a year now and am first on the leader board for my store, so it's been very good to me.
I would love to write an article on this as I just have a billion thoughts, but have no outlet to do so- I'm hoping someone here will appreciate the read & that we can generate some constructive discussion
Thanks to Pathrogas for all the reads- it is interesting reading through these lists and some of the similarities that come up in all our thinking (Including much not written here- e.g I would love to know more about your thoughts on Maindeck Kambal).
I would like to share my take on the list for discussion, as it deviates in key ways from standard lists I am seeing here. I've been working on and playing this list 3x a week for 3 months and was playing Kiki Chord for around a year before that. I have won a couple of cash/store credit events with this list and earlier variations, so it is performing well.
Here is my list, followed by an explanation of some of the more controversial choices (Barring the sideboard, which I think is covered well
by Jeff Hoogland's recent deck tech at the SCG Player's championship- It was nice validation to see him not only switch to Abzan but to also come up
independently to very similar conclusions sideboard-wise as well- many of the same cards and in close numbers no less.
4 Wall of Omens
3 Voice of Resurgence
3 Eternal Witness
3 Kitchen Finks
3 Siege Rhino
1 Thrun, the Last Troll
1 Sigarda, Host of Herons
3 Path to Exile
3 Eldritch Evolution
3 Lingering Souls
4 Runed Halo
2 Maelstrom Pulse
1 Plains
1 Swamp
1 Godless Shrine
1 Overgrown Tomb
1 Shambling Vent
2 Temple Garden
4 Verdant Catacombs
4 Windswept Heath
3 Razorverge Thicket
2 Horizon Canopy
2 Fulminator Mage
4 Surgical Extraction
3 Thoughtseize
2 Stony Silence
1 Eidolon of Rhetoric
1 Cataclysmic Gearhulk
1 Reclamation Sage
1 Abzan Charm
On to card choices and analysis:
My variant of this archetype & methodology is more midrange with incidental combo similar to Kiki Chord than say Abzan Company. I dislike the "wrong half of the deck" problems that random low cmc toolbox creatures generate & this deck plays a strong midrange game with a "combo" of "Here's a fast Sigarda or sideboard hate card". I am totally open to discussion on this, as it's completely feasible that it's correct to have a mix of cards
ie 1 fulminator/rec sage main- but I would rather play with generically good cards across a wide variety of matchups- Maelstrom pulse
is much more powerful than reclamation sage mainboard.
Chord of calling is a slow and clunky card that leads to a swift death if you have no board presence and is often still too
slow even if that board presence is building. For this reason I dislike it in the current format compared to Evo- I want the fast hate
& the fast bomb- and that bomb is Sigarda.
I cut Archangel of Thune early on as I found that eldritch evolution does not lend itself well to multi-piece combo decks.
What Evolution does do well is add consistency & speed to finding key cards- The ability against any traditional fair deck in the format to put a Sigarda in to play and have witnesses to recur it is very powerful.
The problem with evolution is card advantage. To make this work, you want to sacrifice cards that have also generated value.
Wall of omens, voice of resurgence and eternal witness all meet this criteria (& to a lesser extent finks, which I favour much less in other archetypes other than as burn hate).
I notice none of the other lists in this thread are running wall of omens. Interesting. I run it as a 4-of and I would rate it as
one of the best possible cards for the archetype- sacrificing it for a 4-drop keeps you at card parity & even against a control deck
that counters your evolution you are at card parity (In the sense that you usually dont care about the 0/4 in the matchup).
Lingering souls fixes the grixis matchup and is also a powerful tool against affinity and infect- this is a major reason to be in Abzan
& compliments the list well- it is also an excellent follow-up to sacrificing a voice of resurgence due to the immediate boost to the token.
Maindeck Thrun is a concession to control & in particular to planeswalkers- if an opponent drops a fast Nahiri, Koth, or Lili of the last hope what I have found is that you need a hexproof, resilient beater that can't be targeted by removal against removal-heavy walker decks to evolve into, otherwise you lose to their ultimates. I do board Thrun out fairly regularly, but he has earned his slot.
3x Rhino-I noticed with this list that games go long- I was winning a surprising number of games with siege rhino triggers. Having 18 points of lifeswing total in grindy fair games is subtly powerful (Plus they beat down very well) & I would be running 4 still if not for the new need for a second Maelstrom Pulse main.
3x Eldritch Evolution- It does seem strange to have an evolution deck that is not running 4 copies. Over many games with this deck
I have found that I was losing games where I drew all my evolutions and had no targets to evolve & that I wanted to evolve a 2 drop
into siege rhino most of the time anyway. Cutting 1 for another siege rhino was a noticeable improvement.
2 Maelstrom Pulse (+1, cutting a rhino recently)- Lantern control is now a staple in my meta. I hate this deck a lot & would like some additional hedge against it. Difficulty with this matchup against a skilled pilot is a key driver for me creating this post.
4x Runed Halo - Now this is the most controversial card choice by far.. Hear me out, this card has been fantastic. This archetype is soft to various forms of combo. How do you beat Valakut decks game one? How do you beat them full stop? Their engine is very difficult to interact with. As an experiment, I mainboarded this card in our GW deck to resolve this issue. Not only did it singlehandedly swing that matchup in my favour (0-2,0-2 to 2-0,2-0), but it has been the most standout impressive card in the list. It is easy to look at this card as a narrow hate card, but in gameplay, it is like a super terminate mixed with a pre-emptive counterspell and the only matchup so far that it is dead in is Tron.
Few decks especially these days run enchantment removal main
& so any creature you name and all future copies become dead cards bar blocking- and your gameplan is to kill them with Sigarda or Lingering souls in the air anyway.
Naming Blighted Agent/Inkmoth nexus is much more powerful than path, and I have been ruining decks like bloo and death's shadow by naming their
signature card (or the flip-side) as well. Key targets: Valakut,Slippery Bogle, Blighted Agent, Inkmoth Nexus, Etched Champion,Tarmogoyf,Liliana of the veil, Thoughtknot seer (Makes this matchup much much better), Reality Smasher, Celestial Colonnade, Lightning Bolt, Eidolon of the great revel (Savage), Borborygmos Enraged, lightning storm, grape shot, insectile aberration, codex shredder the list goes on. I have gotten to enjoy naming a creature already in play, then watch them draw and play 2 more copies of that creature- & watched a goryo's player draw 40 cards and fail to kill me without bricking g1. It's been a good ride & now all the players in my local scene respect this card.
Thanks for reading!
P.S I want to beat the crap out of lantern control, skilled pilot.
Any tips would be appreciated.
I strongly recommend to anyone playing stock Kiki chord to play luda's list for a while, company is simply too powerful of a card not to play.
some matches and an overdue list:
Burn:
G1: Won the die roll, chorded for kitchen finks twice & killed him with knight beatdown.
G2: Mull to 5, triple goblin guide start, lose.
G3: Very close game, but cast the same lightning helix 3x off witness and then killed him with knight.
2-1
Grixis Griselbrand:
My nightmare matchup.
G1 he doesnt have a fast hand & bricks pretty hard (rare), so scavenging ooze off Fauna shaman is enough to get me there.
G2 I negated his turn 3 Goryo's vengeance to put Griselbrand into play. I later chorded for witness to get back negate and counter a through the breach Emrakul. When he later passed the turn without doing anything I cocoed into a knight, which I killed him with.
2-0
Grixis Control:
G1 I resolve a turn 2 voice followed by a turn 3 knight. He plays a kalitas, but my knight is a 6/6 at this point so I attack him anyway with exalted.
Knight kills him.
G2: He mulls to 5 & I keep triple voice of resurgence plus lands and path, which gets me there easily.
2-0
Jeskai control:
G1 I am wrathed multiple times by anger and by verdict. At one point I am forced to play a 3/3 knight as I had two in hand, so instead of attacking with it I sac a land, get a fetch and then fetch another land to make it a 5/5.
My board state at this point is voice finks knight hierarch, so he casts anger of the gods. He kills the knight after it has attacked him twice, but it put him under a lot of pressure which allowed me later close the game with another one - mid-game Company into double knight is brutal..
G2 I fulminator him into oblivion and then company multiple times, running him over.
2-0
Infect: 1-2
Killed on turn 2 on the draw both losses & didnt see a path in my mulligans.
Wall of omens is sorely missed here because you dont really want to block glistener elf with fauna shaman. G2 I won with fauna shaman into skite into staticaster.
All in all 4-1 & win on breakers.
Very happy with the current list, barring a noticeably weaker infect MU than I’m used to with a more stock Kiki chord (I’ve since updated my SB to include Melira below).
I have cut Magus of the moon from my current list because there is a high percentage of Grixis and Jeskai in my meta, where that card is not at it's best. Fulminator gets the nod for being good against Tron and Jeskai (It's actually fantastic against Jeskai).
While it's true knight is weak to dedicated graveyard hate (Rest in peace), it depends on what that hate is- the most common answer to Abzan company is Grafdigger's cage, which knight doesnt care about.
I only killed with kiki combo once all night, but that was just the nature of my pairings & my not drawing many chords.
Oh one note for Luda with knight and blood moon effects is that in a game against scapeshift I drew bloodmoon when I had a knight out- I used it to sac a stomping ground, (floating red) to then get a basic and cast that blood moon- Since knight was already a 4/4 at that point and it doesn’t really need to be bigger than that to kill people, the inability to sac more lands was irrelevant and the utility of getting another basic out was actually great. Negate is what got me to that point alive, countering a would-be-lethal scapeshift.
My current list is as follows:
3 Path to Exile
3 Chord of Calling
4 Collected Company
4 Birds of paradise
3 Noble Hierarch
3 Voice of Resurgence
3 Fauna Shaman
1 Scavenging Ooze
1 Spellskite
1 Qasali Pridemage
3 Knight of the reliquary
2 Kitchen Finks
1 Fulminator Mage
3 Eternal Witness
1 Restoration Angel
1 Kiki-Jiki
1 Izzet Staticaster
2 Forest
1 Plains
4 Windswept Heath
4 Wooded Foothills
2 Verdant Catacombs
2 Stomping Ground
1 Temple Garden
1 Horizon Canopy
1 Razorverge Thicket
1 Kessig Wolf-Run
1 Grove of the Burn-willows
1 Breeding Pool
1 Sacred Foundry
Sideboard
4 Negate
1 Trinket Mage
1 Engineered Explosives
2 Fulminator Mage
3 Lightning Helix
1 Surgical Extraction
1 Melira, Sylvok Outcast
1 Kataki, War's wage
1 Blood Moon
I'm still tinkering with the numbers a lot, I like 4 knight and 3 finks but the room is really tight.
Very happy with negate again so far despite reducing creature count.
A good recent example of this was the bunch of posts dedicated to sin prodder, which has no merit in this archetype.
Also: "No I don't think so".
In a company shell if you were going 4 of that effect it should be pestermite due to the faster, evasive clock - especially considering Kiki combo is dead to bolt anyway- but I don't actually consider this worth testing regardless.
Hehe thanks Artvi, let's live in peace.
To Luda: Yeah- I cut: 1 finks, 1 phantasmal image, 1 village bell-ringer from your list, for 3 knights.
Finks is great, but both Grixis and Jeskai in my meta run anger- Bell-ringer sucks big-time to draw;
I cut PI because I kept having to coco onto an empty board EOT vs control and having no legal targets for the image- Knight plus nothing is now knight plus knight. While I never minded PI in testing & you get to do some cool things, I always just found I would rather have a knight, particurlarly in a deck with so much 1 into 3 drop acceleration.
I wouldnt run knight in a non-coco shell, being able to hit it + another guy off Coco mitigates the problem where it doesnt generate value on entry because if you coco into knight plus witness, double knight or knight plus voice, your opponent is strained heavily for removal - and this deck casts company multiple times per game.
Playing coco lets us play a much more aggressive gameplan because of noble hierarch exalted and the surprise bash of company- my variant exploits this as it is essentially a hybrid between Kiki Chord and Naya Company.
(I also beat Naya company because finks is so good against them and they can't really tap out against me or I go chord for angel+Kiki)- witness x 3 means I get to coco more too.
There's plenty of jeskai in my meta and I have been crushing them 2-0 every match in the last few weeks because of knight and coco+witness; You strain their removal so heavily & then knight kills them before they can find another answer. The fact that it doesnt die to anger/bolt/helix is a big deal as well & just having it in your deck lets you race opponents like delver because you are just hitting them so hard. If beatdown is too slow like against Tron you can just go for the fauna shaman fulminator-witness plan, which e.g naya coco can't do.
Knight may not fit the "Chord of calling" gameplan, but it really fits the "company" gameplan in a big way- it just kills people. I showed my list to a local Jeskai player who was impressed and annoyed at getting his ass kicked consistently- the first thing he says is “I don’t think you really need knight”.. and then we got paired up for our round and I killed him with one.
I run 10 fetches to facilitate the knight and have actually been finding ghost quarter to be an underperformer because of the opening hands it neuters.
I’ll post a list and some more matches soon, just been very busy.
This is why I ran 4 negate to good results in the past. Negate x4/Thoughtseize x4 plus witnesses vs e.g Grishoalbrand will buy you a lot of time that would otherwise not be possible because it's so hard to silver bullet that deck.
I came to the conclusion that Thoughtseize is better than negate in most matchups (noteable exclusion is living end, where negate plus e.g rhetoric is excellent- though I also prefer negate vs Tron due to stopping t3 karn on the draw, which is often not possible with unified will in standard Kiki chord.
However, because I'm now ludafishing, negate becomes much more difficult to run due to company's strict deckbuilding restrictions-even though negate is also better here thanks to additional blue mana from hierarch. If I was still on p&k Kiki chord I would run 4 Thoughtseize in the sideboard and I would be heavily experimenting with tidehollow sculler.
But I'm not on p&k because.....
I'm convinced now after a few tourneys that Kiki-Coco is the more powerful deck and it's not close, I have been topping events very consistently with it and smashing the blue decks to boot.
@ my fellow ludafishers, knight of the reliquary has been absolutely awesome.
Against a deck like Jeskai that is bolt/helix/anger.dec, your 6/6 with kessig wolf run's trample will murder them because they already had to path your voice/finks... And you have eternal witness and coco to grind them too.
Naya coco as an aggro deck has consistently put up solid results - the reason for that is the power level of knight of the reliquary in a collected company deck as a 6/6 or bigger 3drop... That can also mana ramp, grow itself and also find the monster of a card that is wolf run.
3-1 tonight, 2-0 x3 followed by a very tight 2-1 match where g1 I got manascrewed and g3 I drew 12 lands, got hallowed moonlighted out of a coco and was still in it, because the card advantage in this build is just that crazy awesome.
Side note : knight fixes the 'my cards that all cost 3 or less are lower impact than 4-5 drop cards' problem that I normally have with coco decks. I attacked a Jeskai player for ten tonight twice with one card and that was game.
Had a bad run last night, got turn 3 karned 4x no ***** Hahahaha.. Makes me want to play a deck that just gets dumb free wins like that. Boy do I want Thoughtseize back in my sideboard though.
Path isn't fantastic against any of these decks barring primeval titan and slimming on those would mean you wouldn't be hurting company as much.
Another option I'm considering for my meta is 1x mainboard Anafenza the foremost because it is a decent beater, strategy hoser and still a hit off coco all while not dying to bolt. It's certainly fine vs Abzan company too for example.
I did end up cutting bell-ringer after drawing it a few times- I just can't get behind the card.. but phantasmal image and staticaster were excellent in testing.
I also chose to play 62 cards, as I wanted to test rather than cut the wrong card. I would run 62 again.
Round 1 vs Naya Company:
G1 Coco'd turn 3 into eternal witness + phantasmal image targetting witness, returning collected company and path.
Drew Kiki naturally, so a chord for 7 on turn 4 sealed the deal because he tapped out for a mainphase company of his own (trying for exalted).
G2 No coco, but I used fauna shaman to find scavenging ooze to make his knights tiny & then murdered him with mine- two 6/6's do not muck around.
Kitchen Finks was excellent here.
Round 2 vs Jeskai nahiri: 2-0
G1: T2 kitchen finks into t3 knight after making him deal with it made him wrath on his turn 5, but knight did get a hit in thanks to his bolt & spellsnare-heavy hand -
when he wrathed the kitchen finks remnant was given by exalted by 1 hierarch and a pridemage which I dropped- these little exalted guys really wrack on pressure. Killed him with an attack from qasali pridemage when he dealt with everything else.
G2 he just mulliganed into oblivion and a third/uncontested knight chunked him.
Round 3: Grixis through the breach combo. See Kentaro Yamamoto's recent list. 0-2
I hate this list, I have lost to it 3 weeks in a row. Game 1 I died on turn 4 to simian-through the breach Emrakul and game 2 I died on turn '2' to
simian spirit guide/faithless looting goryo's vengeance Emrakul. This matchup is the reason why Pestermite and triple extraction are in the sideboard, but this is a horrible matchup I very much want to fix.
Round 4: Bogles, 2-0
Turn 1 birds turn 2 fauna shaman is awesome. Got a turn 3 spellskite off shaman followed by a kitchen finks off shaman, followed by combo
since he couldnt attack through finks with spellskite taking all future enchantments.
Game 2 was a repeat of the first except I used fauna shaman to get trinket mage and blow all his stuff up, kaboom.
Round 5: Grixis control 2-0
Voice of resurgence & knight of the reliquary ruled both games & I had the path for his Kalitas.
Having a 6/6 for 3 is just great a lot of the time- it has the wall of omens effect where it can block very effectively for you, but it can also just kill people - especially when these delightful little exalted triggers and the ability to go tutor for a wolf-run during a board stall come into play.
All in all this list was a lot of fun to play and felt stronger than previous kiki chord variants I've played- I would pay 4 mana to put a knight of the reliquary into play at instant speed end of turn, so the deckbuilding constraint/drawback with company of being too low to the ground is mitigated somewhat by this card. Phantasmal image helps with this too because
you can steal something sweet of your opponents- I did just end up copying a knight a few times though!
Getting two 5/5+'s off a coco (which I did against Grixis) is just backbreaking.
1 Izzet Staticaster
3 Noble Hierarch
1 Phantasmal Image
1 Fulminator Mage
3 Eternal Witness
3 Fauna Shaman
1 Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker
2 Kitchen Finks
1 Qasali Pridemage
1 Restoration Angel
1 Scavenging Ooze
1 Spellskite
3 Voice of Resurgence
4 Knight of the Reliquary
1 Grove of the Burnwillows
2 Forest
1 Horizon Canopy
1 Plains
1 Sacred Foundry
2 Stomping Ground
1 Temple Garden
4 Windswept Heath
4 Wooded Foothills
1 Kessig Wolf Run
1 Ghost Quarter
2 Verdant Catacombs
3 Chord of Calling
4 Collected Company
3 Path to Exile
1 Thrun, the Last Troll
2 Fulminator Mage
1 Kataki, War's Wage
1 Stony Silence
1 Engineered Explosives
1 Trinket Mage
2 Lightning Helix
3 Surgical Extraction
1 Pestermite
1 Worship
1 Reveillark
Congratulations on a very respectable result & thanks as always for your quality input.
I echo your thoughts on Fauna Shaman, I’ve recently experimented with cutting it in favour of trying out the 4 Nahiri/1 Emrakul package
& my win percentage has noticeably dropped- I keep having hands with Nahiri where I wish it was Fauna Shaman!!
Nahiri just doesn’t beat degenerate combo like Fauna shaman does & that’s my entire meta right now.
This isn’t to say that Fauna shaman is a better card than Nahiri- & Nahiri “is” fantastic, but it’s interesting that the lists that put up results seem to be of the 2-3 Nahiri variety rather than the 4/Emrakul variety.
All this being said, how were phantasmal image & village bell ringer for you?
My immediate inclination looking at your list is to want to cut both & maybe 1 hierarch and 1 finks in order to put 4 Knight of the reliquary in there.
Knight has consistently impressed me as a very powerful and underplayed card- it is the driving force behind the success of Naya Coco (2 copies in top 8’s at one of the GPs)
& it seems a shame not to abuse it in this naya coco shell as well. The advantage we have over that deck is chordable hate, so the speed/aggression decrease is worth it I think-
but knight is still a very fast clock.
I’d then change 2 township for 1 wolf run and 1 ghost quarter, because 1 ghost quarter is much more consistent with 4 knights and
is a solid additional hedge against Tron particularly when backed with witness chains.
Any thoughts on this?
Cheers,
JA