Yah, the final version of the BUG list should almost certainly run 2-3 gigadrowse. I like your current list, and think builds over 60 cards are worth consideration due to the unique limitations of the deck (primarily because of the necessity of running at least 14 basics).
It's funny you should mention flux, I learned about the card about a week ago and have been thinking that it would be good in a build that uses drift of phantasms to tutor either one of your combo pieces.
I've been busy with school lately, but got sick again so i've had some time to think about the deck. In the last couple of days, i've been testing a BUG version of vinestorm, and am convinced that it is worth exploring.
My current list wins using an infinite combo with Disciple of the Vault, Etherium Sculptor, and Conjurer's Bauble. It can use the synergy between Ehterium Sculptor, 1 cmc cycling artifacts, and sprouting vines to go off; however, it is not reliant on this to win, as the black rituals are stronger than the red ones. It is obviously untuned.
Other ideas include running some number of Balustrade spy, brainstorm, ash barrens, maindeck protection, and Fortuitous find.
Let me know if you have any questions, and I would love to hear your thoughts.
Thanks so much for the reply! I still have the flu, so i'm sorry if some of these points lack clarity. Please inform me if anything need elucidation.
How so? What matchups are you struggling to board against?
Mostly faster match ups where I want at least 3 sideboard cards, like Affinity, Stompy, Delver, Burn, and RDW. How would you sideboard when faced with these matchups in a list that runs AK?
I don't like muddle at all. IMO the card is garbage in this list (not in general but in this list it is). merchant scroll is where you want to be if you are playing tutors, but that is not legal online as of now.
I agree that it probably shouldn't be run main deck, I only intended it to be an example of a card we might consider.
I have played impulse for quite some time. The three issues that I had with the card was that it never provided card advantage, did not allow you to get ahead, and sometimes forced you to bottom needed combo pieces. One thing I have noticed with the deck is that if you don't play AK, the only way to net cards and generate mana is with gush, which felt weaker to me. I have also tried peer through depths, but I felt like impulse was better as it could get lands and petals.
Impulse does not directly provide card advantage, but it can find gush/words and does net a card in conjunction with vines. I'm not sure what you mean when you say that AK "did not allow you to get ahead". Additionally, i'm not sure how it forces one to bottom their combo pieces. Are you talking about situations in which you have neither main combo pice in hand, and impulse into both of them? If so, these situations are rare and when they do occur, the fact that you must bottom at least one combo piece is a very minor downside.
I have rarely had gy hate be an issue, and this deck is not that weak to gy hate imo. I have beaten multiple relics and spellbombs in the past, and I am fine if people want to bring them in over discard or counter magic.
People won't bring gy hate in over discard or counter magic, but instead bring all of them in amd boarded out creature removal. While you can play around gy hate in many situations it makes your AKs and rite of flames much worse.
Suppose you're planning on casting tolarian winds with rolling thunder in hand, you have two AK's in the yard, and a third AK in your hand. Your opponent has a relic and has the option to crack it. Your best play in this situation is to cast AK, and bait your opponent to crack relic in response so that you can eventually bauble your thunder. In this case, the best possible situation is one where you just used 1b to cantrip a card, and in which your next AK will also be significantly worse.
Situations where either your AK or rite gets significantly worse occur almost every time your opponent sides in GY hate.
I have tried words of wisdom in the past and I didn't like the card it gave to my opponent. Against decks like stompy affinity and burn, you could never cast it. [/qoute]
Words of wisdom is better than AK against stompy, affinity, and burn because it nets a card on the first cast. One doesn't have the time or mana against these decks to develop AKs. You can cast words against these decks at the end of the turn before you go off or on the combo turn.
[quote] Against blue decks, sometimes I would be in the middle of the combo, they have 2 blue open (no counters in hand), and you were in a position where you were forced to cast words of wisdom and you drew them into their out. Giving the opponent a card matters quite a bit.
The blue deck situation is not worth considering, as it is a very fringe case. The card can lose you the game, but these situations are very rare.
Highly disagree. Brainstorm is miles above ponder in this deck provided you have your list built with ways to make brainstorm effective. The instant speed and synergy it has with things like sprouting vines and tolarian winds matter a lot. It has a much higher skill cap than ponder, but if you use it properly it can win games.
Brainstorm is better than ponder in vinestorm. But it is only strong in two situations. The first is when you cast it in conjunction with some shuffle effect (vines or shuffle land), and the second is on your combo turn but before you cast vines/winds. In the grand majority of cases, the amount of brainstorms we want in our hard is at most n+1, where n is the number of shuffle effects in our hand. Running brainstorm as a 4 of increase the probability that you will have multiple copies of brainstorm in hand before you combo of. Ponder also works very well with our shuffle effects, doesn't require shuffle effects, is good on our combo turn as it can go 4 cards deep, and allows us to keep a larger set of 1 land hands. I'm not sure if brainstorm is good enough to run as a 4 of because of this.
I'm not sure if this is the flu talking, but I believe that main deck AK is incorrect and that instead we should run a combination of card selection/Words of Wisdom. I'm not going to give an exhaustive argument here, because i'm exhausted.
First, it makes sideboarding clunky.
Second, running AK over selection/tutors (like impulse or Muddle) makes our sideboard worse. With a greater amount of selection we can look through a greater set of cards to find our high impact sideboard cards.
Third, it makes much more vulnerable to GY hate.
Finally, words of wisdom is a better card the majority of the time. Words of wisdom is better on the first cast, and is equally good on the second. The value of the third and fourth cast is not strong enough to justify main deck AK, as they are often auxiliary to our combo. While it can lead to some feel bad moments where our opponent draws a counterspell off our words, these cases are insignificant.
tl;dr pls send flu cure 2 canada.
I also think we should run a 3 brainstorm/1 ponder split. But that is a different story.
Hey all, thanks for all of the great ideas that you have been brewing for the deck. What follows are some morning thoughts on the conversation since my previous post.
Ash Barrens is an amazing card once one learns how to use it (which i'm still in the process of). There are so many niche situations where the fixing or shuffle effect has significantly impacted the game in my favour. In builds that I run evolving wilds, I rarely keep hands that only have one of them without any other lands. This is the same as Ash Barrens. So while the mulligan rate is slightly higher running Ash Barrens, the payoff is well worth it.
Spell pierce is great in the board, but I think we ought to keep at least a couple dispels for the delver matchups. They can usually just pay for spell pierce by the time we go off, which makes it an ineffectual card in the matchup.
I really like the idea of moment's peace in the board. How have you found it in testing so far?
Thanks for all of the great responses. I've been testing 4 AK, 4 inner fire, 4 vines, and 4 winds in the maindeck and it has been working excellently. This is my current list:
The major problem with this build is that by only running 12 islands in the main, we are forced to have a high mulligan rate. While AK does partially mitigate this, I think finding a way to run 13 islands would probably make the deck better. The other problem i've been having with the build is sideboarding, as cards like rite and AK tend to be inflexible. However, I don't think that this is a significant problem with the build, as we cannot sacrifice a lot of slots in the deck for sideboarding in any build of the deck.
I've also been testing a single forest in the sideboard for slow matchups, which allows us to take out the petals to make more space for higher impact cards.
Gigadrowse as a one of main deck is fine in my experience. Against slower blue decks, like teachings or U/x tron, we don't need multiple copies of the spell in game one, as they don't apply enough pressure to make it necessary. Against mono-u delver, our game one matchup is terrible anyways, and i've found that even with 2 or 3 gigadrowse maindeck, we often don't have enough time to find one.
On the topic of Ash Barrens, I think running them as a 4 of is correct. They're amazing with brainstorm, which i've also added a fourth copy of.
@ins
I would first like to say that nothing you have said comes across to me as being overtly negative, or adversarial. I 100% support critical approaches to deck building. I will read some of Karsten's articles.
I agree that our combo is somewhat disanalogous to twin. As you noted, we have other lines to comboing off other than casting both vines and winds. My problem with the lines that do not use both vine and winds is that they have a low rate of success in my previous testing/builds of vinestorm. While I have never tried main deck AKs, i'm skeptical that they will provide enough of a benefit to justify running them over card selection. In my experience, if you use the vine and winds combo, then you almost always win. Because of the significant difference in winrate between lines that use both vine and winds and lines that do not, card selection seems to be a better option than main deck AK. As i've never tested main deck AK, it's too early for me to establish which version of the deck is correct. However, it is hard for me to see why we shouldn't run 4 copies of winds, as they are necessary for almost all of the winning lines in vinestorm.
I wanted to ask you both if you think Inner Fire as a 4 of is correct, as i've found that 3 is sufficient in most cases. Also, do you think Ideas is better than Words of Wisdom? The UU and sorcery speed of the spell has always been off-putting to me.
On the topic of thought vessel,Library of Leng is just way better.
On the topic of a plan against aggro, I think outracing them is the right plan, using simian spirit guides and eot word of wisdom to increase your pace.
"One mistake I see people make sometimes is to play less than four of their combo card, because it’s “slow” or “doesn’t do anything outside of the combo.” I remember seeing a lot of lists with three Splinter Twins, for example. This is just stupid—if you can’t accept having dead Splinter Twins in your hand, then play a different deck. The amount of games you’ll lose because you didn’t draw any of those is much greater than the number of times you’ll get Twin-Flooded (also look at Estratti, he has six!)."
It's funny you should mention flux, I learned about the card about a week ago and have been thinking that it would be good in a build that uses drift of phantasms to tutor either one of your combo pieces.
something like:
4 Ash Barrens
13 Islands
1 Mountain
4 Rite of Flame
4 Preordain
4 Brainstorm
1 Conjurer's Bauble
2 Gigadrowse
4 Manamorphose
3 Sprouting Vines
2 Tolarian Winds
1 Flux
3 Drift of Phantasms
1 Seething Song
4 Inner Fire
Finally, pieces of the puzzle is significantly better than uncovered clues.
I've been busy with school lately, but got sick again so i've had some time to think about the deck. In the last couple of days, i've been testing a BUG version of vinestorm, and am convinced that it is worth exploring.
My current list wins using an infinite combo with Disciple of the Vault, Etherium Sculptor, and Conjurer's Bauble. It can use the synergy between Ehterium Sculptor, 1 cmc cycling artifacts, and sprouting vines to go off; however, it is not reliant on this to win, as the black rituals are stronger than the red ones. It is obviously untuned.
Other ideas include running some number of Balustrade spy, brainstorm, ash barrens, maindeck protection, and Fortuitous find.
Let me know if you have any questions, and I would love to hear your thoughts.
4 Preordain
4 Conjurer's Bauble
4 Dark Ritual
4 Chromatic Star
4 Chromatic Sphere
1 Disciple of the Vault
3 Ponder
4 Tolarian Winds
4 Cabal Ritual
4 Etherium Sculptor
4 Sprouting Vines
3 Gush
Mostly faster match ups where I want at least 3 sideboard cards, like Affinity, Stompy, Delver, Burn, and RDW. How would you sideboard when faced with these matchups in a list that runs AK?
I agree that it probably shouldn't be run main deck, I only intended it to be an example of a card we might consider.
Impulse does not directly provide card advantage, but it can find gush/words and does net a card in conjunction with vines. I'm not sure what you mean when you say that AK "did not allow you to get ahead". Additionally, i'm not sure how it forces one to bottom their combo pieces. Are you talking about situations in which you have neither main combo pice in hand, and impulse into both of them? If so, these situations are rare and when they do occur, the fact that you must bottom at least one combo piece is a very minor downside.
People won't bring gy hate in over discard or counter magic, but instead bring all of them in amd boarded out creature removal. While you can play around gy hate in many situations it makes your AKs and rite of flames much worse.
Suppose you're planning on casting tolarian winds with rolling thunder in hand, you have two AK's in the yard, and a third AK in your hand. Your opponent has a relic and has the option to crack it. Your best play in this situation is to cast AK, and bait your opponent to crack relic in response so that you can eventually bauble your thunder. In this case, the best possible situation is one where you just used 1b to cantrip a card, and in which your next AK will also be significantly worse.
Situations where either your AK or rite gets significantly worse occur almost every time your opponent sides in GY hate.
The blue deck situation is not worth considering, as it is a very fringe case. The card can lose you the game, but these situations are very rare.
Brainstorm is better than ponder in vinestorm. But it is only strong in two situations. The first is when you cast it in conjunction with some shuffle effect (vines or shuffle land), and the second is on your combo turn but before you cast vines/winds. In the grand majority of cases, the amount of brainstorms we want in our hard is at most n+1, where n is the number of shuffle effects in our hand. Running brainstorm as a 4 of increase the probability that you will have multiple copies of brainstorm in hand before you combo of. Ponder also works very well with our shuffle effects, doesn't require shuffle effects, is good on our combo turn as it can go 4 cards deep, and allows us to keep a larger set of 1 land hands. I'm not sure if brainstorm is good enough to run as a 4 of because of this.
First, it makes sideboarding clunky.
Second, running AK over selection/tutors (like impulse or Muddle) makes our sideboard worse. With a greater amount of selection we can look through a greater set of cards to find our high impact sideboard cards.
Third, it makes much more vulnerable to GY hate.
Finally, words of wisdom is a better card the majority of the time. Words of wisdom is better on the first cast, and is equally good on the second. The value of the third and fourth cast is not strong enough to justify main deck AK, as they are often auxiliary to our combo. While it can lead to some feel bad moments where our opponent draws a counterspell off our words, these cases are insignificant.
tl;dr pls send flu cure 2 canada.
I also think we should run a 3 brainstorm/1 ponder split. But that is a different story.
Ash Barrens is an amazing card once one learns how to use it (which i'm still in the process of). There are so many niche situations where the fixing or shuffle effect has significantly impacted the game in my favour. In builds that I run evolving wilds, I rarely keep hands that only have one of them without any other lands. This is the same as Ash Barrens. So while the mulligan rate is slightly higher running Ash Barrens, the payoff is well worth it.
Spell pierce is great in the board, but I think we ought to keep at least a couple dispels for the delver matchups. They can usually just pay for spell pierce by the time we go off, which makes it an ineffectual card in the matchup.
I really like the idea of moment's peace in the board. How have you found it in testing so far?
My current list is:
1x Gigadrowse
4x Gush
2x Impulse
4x Manamorphose
4x Sprouting Vines
4x Tolarian Winds
1x Conjurer's Bauble
4x Lotus Petal
4x Inner Fire
1x Kaervek's Torch
1x Pieces of the Puzzle
4x Preordain
4x Rite of Flame
4x Ash Barrens
13x Island
1x Mountain
I've also been running one with + Muddle the Mixture and Rolling Thunder, - Pieces and Torch.
4x Ash Barrens
4x Brainstorm
1x Conjurer's Bauble
1x Gigadrowse
4x Gush
4x Inner Fire
12x Island
1x Kaervek's Torch
4x Lotus Petal
4x Manamorphose
1x Mountain
4x Preordain
4x Rite of Flame
4x Sprouting Vines
4x Tolarian Winds
The major problem with this build is that by only running 12 islands in the main, we are forced to have a high mulligan rate. While AK does partially mitigate this, I think finding a way to run 13 islands would probably make the deck better. The other problem i've been having with the build is sideboarding, as cards like rite and AK tend to be inflexible. However, I don't think that this is a significant problem with the build, as we cannot sacrifice a lot of slots in the deck for sideboarding in any build of the deck.
I've also been testing a single forest in the sideboard for slow matchups, which allows us to take out the petals to make more space for higher impact cards.
Gigadrowse as a one of main deck is fine in my experience. Against slower blue decks, like teachings or U/x tron, we don't need multiple copies of the spell in game one, as they don't apply enough pressure to make it necessary. Against mono-u delver, our game one matchup is terrible anyways, and i've found that even with 2 or 3 gigadrowse maindeck, we often don't have enough time to find one.
On the topic of Ash Barrens, I think running them as a 4 of is correct. They're amazing with brainstorm, which i've also added a fourth copy of.
@ins
I would first like to say that nothing you have said comes across to me as being overtly negative, or adversarial. I 100% support critical approaches to deck building. I will read some of Karsten's articles.
I agree that our combo is somewhat disanalogous to twin. As you noted, we have other lines to comboing off other than casting both vines and winds. My problem with the lines that do not use both vine and winds is that they have a low rate of success in my previous testing/builds of vinestorm. While I have never tried main deck AKs, i'm skeptical that they will provide enough of a benefit to justify running them over card selection. In my experience, if you use the vine and winds combo, then you almost always win. Because of the significant difference in winrate between lines that use both vine and winds and lines that do not, card selection seems to be a better option than main deck AK. As i've never tested main deck AK, it's too early for me to establish which version of the deck is correct. However, it is hard for me to see why we shouldn't run 4 copies of winds, as they are necessary for almost all of the winning lines in vinestorm.
I wanted to ask you both if you think Inner Fire as a 4 of is correct, as i've found that 3 is sufficient in most cases. Also, do you think Ideas is better than Words of Wisdom? The UU and sorcery speed of the spell has always been off-putting to me.
On the topic of thought vessel,Library of Leng is just way better.
On the topic of a plan against aggro, I think outracing them is the right plan, using simian spirit guides and eot word of wisdom to increase your pace.
I've noticed that you both only run 3 of each combo piece. I did the same until I read PV's article on combo (http://www.channelfireball.com/home/pvs-playhouse-combo/). The most relevant part is:
"One mistake I see people make sometimes is to play less than four of their combo card, because it’s “slow” or “doesn’t do anything outside of the combo.” I remember seeing a lot of lists with three Splinter Twins, for example. This is just stupid—if you can’t accept having dead Splinter Twins in your hand, then play a different deck. The amount of games you’ll lose because you didn’t draw any of those is much greater than the number of times you’ll get Twin-Flooded (also look at Estratti, he has six!)."
Thoughts?