I tried to write a primer-style post about this archetype before, but I got too cute with pictures and ran afoul of the spam detector and lost the post. Sad beats.
Memorial to Folly returning Molderhulk to hand, Molderhulk returning Memorial to Folly to the battlefield. Free 6/6.
As above, but with a flipped Temple of Aclazotz in play, you get an interaction similar to the one between The Scarab God and Temple of Aclazotz in Standard right now - 6 life and a free block each turn to stabilize against aggressive decks.
Glowspore Shaman putting Memorial to Folly on top of your library. Strong virtual card advantage by setting up a great draw the next turn.
As above, but follow up with a Jadelight Ranger for direct card advantage after setting up a powerful draw.
Plaguecrafter sacrificing Stitcher's Supplier or a past-its-expiration-date Llanowar Elves. Virtual card advantage, since your irrelevant body becomes relevant (+1 card) and you get a card of theirs (+2 cards) for the price of one (-1 card; +2-1 = +1).
Not really an "interaction" but if you draw the one Josu Vess and need to play it on curve, the high amount of recursion in this deck ensures that you aren't spewing the ability to use his kicker in that game. You can find ways to get rid of him and then rebuy him once you have enough mana to kick.
Cards to consider:
Necrotic Wound - very efficient removal spell in the middle game, instrumental in turning the corner. I have one in the sideboard, I kinda want to try out one maindeck and one sideboard for matchups where you're either tagging an X/1 or X/2 by turn 4 or the game is going long enough for this to be a crucial double/triple-spell card on turns 5-7.
Golgari Findbroker - solid recursion card, I just found that aside from recurring the very occasional planeswalker or the card I'm about to mention, it was generally worse than Molderhulk at the job it tried to do and worse than Ravenous Chupacabra and Josu Vess as an on-curve play. Recurring planeswalkers happened so rarely that that upside wasn't worth it once I cut the next card. But it's not a bad card in the shell.
The Eldest Reborn - you already set up the final chapter very easily, and the first and second chapters are reasonable enough value. The synergy with Golgari Findbroker (final chapter returns Findbroker to play, Findbroker returns Eldest Reborn to hand, play Eldest Reborn and do it all again) was what pushed it over the top to get inclusion in a top-end filled with viable cards. Without Findbroker I don't think this card is doing enough compared to Izoni and friends.
Mausoleum Secrets - an obviously busted card in the right shell but I can't figure this out. Really seems to want a combo piece, just being a generically good topdeck for a fair deck isn't really good enough.
Gruesome Menagerie - again, just returning Plaguecrafter + Stitcher's Supplier + <2-drop> isn't doing it for me. If your opponent has a flier and you have a Kraul Harpooner in the graveyard then you're doing it, but in the abstract this doesn't hit enough cards in a fair deck.
Doom Whisperer - this card is good but ultimately gets 1-for-1'd too easily. Yes the repeated surveiling is worth a card, but is it worth the life? That's a real question in every matchup except Teferi Control.
Key considerations:
Molderhulk trades or eats everything in the Steel Leaf Stompy decks except Vine Mare, notably including Carnage Tyrant; it recurs itself via Memorial to Folly; and it gains a healthy six life per turn if you have Temple of Aclazotz going. This, alongside playing a lot of Ravenous Chupacabra, Plaguecrafter, and six creatures which can block Vine Mare and trade with it (Kraul Harpooner, Jadelight Ranger if you reveal a single spell off 2x explore), should give you enough ways to stall Stompy's aggression and win a longer game. I have some Cast Down and Vraska's Contempt in the sideboard for extra removal. Vivien Reid is the most important card on their side in postboard games.
Boros is an easy matchup as long as you keep hands that do things and don't spew removal. You need to save removal for their flying squad (almost always Aurelia, Lyra; sometimes Shalai and Rekindling Phoenix). All of their little bodies generally should not matter because they can't get through your creatures. The only serious danger besides that is a Knight of Grace that gets 2+ counters on it, since you can't hit it with your targeted removal and its first strike and 5+ power make it impossible to kill in combat, but a single Izoni should give you enough chump blockers to figure out a plan. Molderhulk also cleans up ground pounders basically no matter their size.
You have enough grind potential to beat any midrange and control deck. Again, don't spew removal on unnecessary targets. Save your removal for flying threats and planeswalkers and rely on your board to stall ground pounders.
How is a 3 mana 4/4 that grows every turn and can grow in-combat bad? Charnel Troll is probably the best overgrowth payoff in the set.
I have not liked Charnel Troll at all. It's much harder to fuel than it appears to be, it taxes the graveyard so heavily that you can't use it as a meaningful resource for anything else, and the payoff is "just" an overstated 3-mana beater. It's really hard to find a way to play enough high-pressure cards to close out a game before Troll is a liability while still playing anemic enablers like Stitcher's Supplier to play Troll on-curve while still having enough total resources to do anything.
I think you have it dead backwards when you call Troll an Undergrowth payoff. It hurts all your other Undergrowth cards.
Here are the real Undergrowth payoffs in no particular order:
Izoni, Thousand-Eyed - superb finisher, if you remember Ishkanah, Grafwidow from the last time graveyard-centric mechanics were tier 1 in Standard, the card is like that. You put a ton of board presence down and make combat impossible then win with her, her swarm, and whatever else you have lying around.
Molderhulk - I think this card is only playable with exactly Memorial to Folly in your deck, but once it is, you have a real engine going. In the later game this is a 2-mana 6/6 that draws you an uncounterable Regrowth if it resolves. Even in the middle game, playing it for five mana and getting yourself to Izoni or other payoff mana is worthwhile, since the likelihood of getting it back and chaining off a Hulkfolly loop is so high.
Necrotic Wound - basically a 1-of or at most 2-of, but an extremely efficient removal spell that deals with any creature for 1 mana by around turn 4-5 or so. Lets you double or triple spell where you otherwise wouldn't.
But you see how Charnel Troll messes with all of these? As a matter of fact, I would point-blank say that if you play Charnel Troll you cannot play any other Undergrowth effects. They all scale so drastically that even small incremental chewing is more disruptive than you'd think.
Battering Greathorn - 1RRR
Creature - Goat Beast
First strike
Morph 1RR
When Battering Greathorn enters the battlefield or is flipped face-up, it deals damage equal to its power divided as you choose among any number of targets.
3/1
Al-Grunuk, the Lone Guardian1WW
Legendary Creature - Camel
Vigilance, lifelink
When Al-Grunuk, the Last Dromedary attacks or blocks, it gets -1/-0 for each other attacking or blocking creature you control.
4/4
I still hate having to play Cinder Barrens, and it might be right to quit playing Rekindling Phoenix, max out on Bolas and play a couple more interactive spells, but if cutting Phoenix is wrong, I don't really wanna be right.... I keep running into decks that just don't have outs to it, and it has such a great stabilizing interaction with Temple of Aclazotz. Tough life.
Shock or Dead Weight is essential. I like that Shock isn't 100% dead against Teferi control, but in fairness, the number of times where it's worth a card are really low (it's basically just if they let Phoenix resolve on t4 to cast a draw spell and then untap and tuck a threat with Teferi). Shock being able to tag Tajic, Legion's Edge or Legion Warboss before combat is big game, but Dead Weight actually killing Adanto Vanguard is pretty big too. And although fringe, it's slightly easier to use Dead Weight in tandem with e.g. Lava Coil to bring down a Lyra Dawnbringer or Aurelia, Champion of Justice than it is to use Shock, since you can do it over separate turns. Whichever ends up being right, I'm not sure if I should play two or three copies maindeck. I've been leaning on two because I don't want too many dead cards vs attrition or control pseudo-mirrors. I'm still leaning toward Shock for the instant-speed applications, but both are good. You need one of them.
I'm struggling a bit with the rest of the interaction moving up from that to Vraska's Contempt. I really wish we had a card like Never // Return so Contempt wasn't the only out to planeswalkers (although it's worthy to note that planeswalkers are getting a lot weaker with the departure of KLD + AKH blocks; Teferi is the only real standout left), but since we don't, your intermediate removal between your 1cc interaction and Contempt really needs to cover the bases well. I'm thinking about going up on Essence Scatters accordingly.
This is the best deck I've put together so far. It's got game against everything and is reminiscent of the Jund-style midrange decks that always seem to do well in non-broken Standard formats.
Sideboarding is a bit of a mess. These are the three commandments of the format for day 1:
1. Have a plan for W/x go-wide decks. Selesnya is great at getting 2+ pieces per card (whether by cheating on lands and playing District Guide to make land drops or literally making 2+ bodies per card with Emmara, Soul of the Accord), and Boros is great at making every last piece on the board relevant. The top of the curve of this Grixis deck is great at invalidating random leftover bodies, but you don't always get to them in a timely manner. Fiery Cannonade is quite good.
2. Have a plan for turn-2 Steel Leaf Champion. This deck isn't great at dealing with it, honestly. The four drops trade at an advantage, but that's two whole attacks from the Champ if you're on the draw. The maindeck copies of Shock are a concession to this possible start. I haven't figured out the best mix of interaction and threats yet. I may end up maindecking some copies of Lava Coil and shipping some of the miscellaneous spells to the sideboard or out of the list altogether. I just don't want to get rid of too many Ionize types of cards because...
3. Have a plan for creatureless Teferi, Hero of Dominaria control. This deck should actually be very good at beating Teferi control decks, I think. Thought Erasure is fantastic for setting up Thief of Sanity or creating windows to resolve a 4-drop, and playsets of Erasure and Vraska's Contempt plus a couple of Ionize give me a lot of ways to interact with Teferi. Arguel's Blood Fast and Notion Rain are great here too.
I don't think this list is "there" yet but if you're going to SCG Cincinnati to start the season and like this style of deck, I wholeheartedly endorse this as a good starting point and believe I've got the maindeck 80% right. Sideboarding and the final slots will come down to your testing.
Thief of Sanity is anything but. I think this card is better than Glint-Sleeve Siphoner even accounting for the increased mana cost. I was down on it earlier in the thread, but a lot of its value comes from (a) the t2 Thought Erasure -> t3 Thief earlygame sequence, and (b) whether or not Shock effects are widespread, both of which are hard to see on paper. I played with it and I think it's great now. Doom Whisperer is great.
I've liked a couple copies of Lazav, the Multifarious. It's about like Omenspeaker in the early game, which is acceptable if unspectacular, but Lazav is an absolute monster topdeck late in the game, turning into Doom Whisperer to get some card filtering early and then switching gears to drawing cards as a clone of Thief of Sanity. And if you're straight UB and can manage to play Nightveil Predator and get one into your graveyard, then Lazav can do the old Scarab God "hold up Gearhulk" trick to protect himself from removal. I don't think Lazav is a 4-of, but as a 2-of he seems quite nice. You can round out the 2-spot on the curve with removal and Thought Erasure and Arguel's Blood Fast so no issues there.
The only hole that's left is at 4 mana. Nightveil Predator is still medium and I'd like something a bit better (although the synergy with Lazav is pretty nice). I really wish the mana would support Thought Erasure on 2 and Rekindling Phoenix on four.
where's your Flame of Keld bro? I know that clashes with cards like Demanding Dragon and even the Phoenix, but if you're really trying to burn 'em out that card seems like a lock
The problem as it stands is that it's missing two and three drops to hold together to the bomb 4CMC+ creatures. The best ones are in green in the explore merfolk since it plays with the graveyard theme. That means you want to be heavier in green, which shouldn't be too bad, but consider the two shocklands overlap in black we actually want to be more black heavy, and black doesn't have the 1-3 drop creatures we want for now.
I suggest everyone to really pay attention to your mana base and not just cram every card into the deck just because it's in the colors.
Pretend you can play infinite rainbow lands, what creature curve would you play? The Merfolk Branchwalker + Jadelight Ranger + bombs core worked well before. I'm actually having the opposite problem you are -- Sultai has a ton of excellent spells and if you don't mind being heavier on green, can shore up the early game with those two + Brontodon, but I don't know what all of this is building up to. I'm a big buyer of Doom Whisperer, but if the next best card in the 4+ cc category is Nightveil Predator, I don't think I'm in.
Maybe it's planeswalkers? I've been dying to use Karn, Tezzeret and Treasure Map together, and it wouldn't be hard to slot in something like Chromatic Lantern to get Karn enough artifacts to play with.
Whatever it is, I think it needs to be something:
(a) threatening
(b) sidesteps removal or trades positively with it
Whisperer lets you convert life into filtering at a nice rate so you're not completely down on cards, and beats the hell out of the enemy if it isn't removed immediately, so I like that. The planeswalkers get some value in the face of removal. Once we're in the realm of Thief of Sanity (dangerous if unchecked, but has to connect before it does anything) or the Predator (just not threatening enough for its mana cost; nice set of keywords, good rate overall, but the rate is tied up in things that don't generate value or put a real clock on the enemy), I'm not liking it so much...
Fetchlands like Grow from the Ashes can be counted as 1 source and acts like a checkland.
Mana Dorks like Llanowar Elves would count for .5 mana source while Dragon's Hoard and Manalith would count for full mana source.
And Gift of Paradise which taps land and adds any color would count for 1.5.
I believe Frank mentions in the article that for cantrips like Opt / Anticipate. These can be treated as .25 which would explain reasoning for lower counts on burn decks.
I guess I'll also note the case for when we need to cast cards that have a double mana requirement on Turn 2/3/4/5
His chart states you need about
20 on Turn 2
19 on Turn 3
18 on Turn 4
16 on Turn 5
Since those are the most important turns.
(complicated tangent incoming)
All correct, though you should note that Gift is being counted "extra" because it specifically makes the land enchanted tap for two mana of any one color. Something like Unbridled Growth should only be counted as one source because it only makes one mana of any color. Also, be careful as to how you account sources like Unbridled Growth. If you have only ten lands that make green mana, then counting Unbridled Growth as a green source to get to the requisite 14 green sources to cast Unbridled Growth, or Attune with Aether (RIP), etc. is circular and faulty, since you already must have the green source to cast Growth in the first place. You may, however, count Growth as green sources for the purposes of casting, say, a 2GG spell like Bristling Hydra, since you could cast Hydra off of Forest, Plains, Plains, Island by enchanting a non-Forest land with Growth.
(/tangent)
And yes, the double mana requirements are important. I left them out of the initial post because I wanted to focus on the shockland/checkland interactions, which need only one land of the appropriate type. But when constructing any manabase you must take those requirements into account for making sure you can actually cast your spells.
This is good, it doesn't take into account ramps though, but I suppose that is another discussion.
Kind of. The adjustments for ramp spells are pretty straightforward to make, though a bit complicated to explain in writing. They're related enough that they should be discussed here. Good catch.
If your ramp spell involves tutoring a land of a particular type (e.g. Grow from the Ashes which gets any basic land type), then you may count each copy as a full source of any color of mana, and a full source of any basic land type for your checklands. That means a deck with four Grow from the Ashes can play four fewer lands of appropriate basic types if it wants. Just be aware that since you can't play Grow from the Ashes until turn 3, you can't count it toward your needs on turns 2-3 for checklands entering untapped. (Which means using this to cheat on sources for checklands is unlikely to work out well, but you can use this to cheat on color counts.)
If your ramp spell involves putting a permanent into play which taps for mana (e.g. Dragon's Hoard), then you can count each copy as a full source of any color of mana, but unless the permanent somehow also has the appropriate basic land type, you can't count it for checklands. Be careful when cutting lands to accommodate these types of cards, because you don't want to go too low on your land types for checklands.
If your ramp spell is Gift of Paradise or otherwise enchants a land, then how you count it will vary depending on the enchantment in question, but you can typically treat it like a permanent which taps for mana. The key difference is that in the case of Gift specifically, Gift makes your land tap for two mana of any one color, meaning it fixes for an amount greater than one source of every color. (Example: a Bant deck playing Settle the Wreckage can cast it off of Forest, Forest, Island if one of the Forests has Gift on it.) I would count it as roughly 1.5 sources each; Karsten used this approximation for similar cards in the past and I find it's a good enough heuristic.
Well, I guess I was wrong. I guessed that Wizards would release a new set of dual lands this time around since I figured another go at the shocklands would be kind of stale. (That, and they're still relatively inexpensive, so not printing them again would mean more fodder down the line for future Masters sets.)
I guess that, while I am a bit disappointed seeing another batch of shocklands, I am grateful that the price of these things will absolutely plummet, and virtually everyone will be able to afford a set of these things without breaking the bank.
I don't think they're going to drop off by a lot. Consider that Standard legality will increase the demand for them. There are plenty of players who don't have shocklands yet and there's recent precedent (with the KTK fetches) of Standard demand causing a price spike. I think their comparatively higher availability will mean the price doesn't go up as much (and probably goes down overall) but I don't expect it to move all that much.
Yeah Polluted Delta spiked super hard from $99.99 to $12.
Don't be obtuse. Deltas were sitting around $10 for a year before BFZ introduced battle lands. The battle land + fetchland interaction made them ubiquitous in Standard and they jumped back up to $20. The point is that Standard demand is a significant factor in price even when accounting for recent increases in supply of cards that everyone "should" be picking up (one common argument is that prices won't rise because everyone "should" have shocklands already).
I expect shockland prices to go up from Standard demand, like the checklands that were reprinted in Ixalan did -- there were many printings of them before Ixalan, but the increase in demand from Standard was enough to push the prices up anyway. Very similar situation here. In the longer run when the shocklands aren't Standard legal, then this reprinting will of course drop their price compared to where it was before the reprint was announced tonight.
TEFERI LAUGHS STILL KING. MAYBE VRAKSA CAN CHALLENGE?
Would it be too powerful if it could do direct damage to an opposing player? They could drop its Loyalty by One.
But I do like that it cannot be hosed by graveyard exiles and jumpstart since damage is equal to spells in your graveyard and an exile. And the art is quite good. Does that cloth belong to anyone in particular?
Reminds me of the Ajani art with Elspeth's cloak. It's the Brotherhood of the Traveling Cloak
Let's start with the taplands. These are generally not good enough for competitive play. If you need them as a budget option, you do you, but they should very rarely be seen in competitive decks - at most as a 1-2 of for decks with very intensive costs in two colors.
The checklands and shocklands have strong synergy, like the Amonkhet cycling cycle had with the checklands. Most of the numbers for building manabases are already pretty easy to derive from the current format, and I'll go over them in a minute, but the first thing to focus in on is the differences between the cycling cycle and the shocklands. The shocklands can come into play untapped and cannot be cycled. This implies two things:
(1) If the spells exist to create it, the mana supports a faster format. Curve considerations will be more important because your opponents are not going to miss a beat from stumbling on tapped lands very often. The checklands will almost always enter untapped and the shocklands will always enter untapped if your opponent needs them to do so.
(2) You have fewer ways to mitigate mana flood in the later game. Decks that played cycle lands typically played one more land than they normally would for the same cmc/curve profile. You will probably see about one fewer land than before, or if people continue to play the same land counts, good mana sinks will be a higher priority than before, since you don't have mana sinks built into your lands.
This article was written with mana fixing in mind, but we can adapt the numbers for shocks/checks analysis. After all, the hypergeometric distribution used to get those numbers is just as valid for finding certain colors at a certain time as it is for finding certain land types at a certain time.
The relevant table in list form - using 90% as the threshold of reliability:
You need 14 lands of a specific subtype for your checkland to enter untapped on turn 2. (You will need to find and play the correct land on turn 1 to accomplish this, so we use the number for finding 1 source of colored mana on turn 1, since we must find 1 source of a land type to play on turn 1.)
You need 13 lands of the right type for your checkland to enter untapped on turn 3.
12 for turn 4.
10 for turn 5.
You'll find that some successful tournament decks last season cheated on these numbers a bit or used certain spells (notably Attune with Aether, before it was banned) to fix their land counts and curve out properly. You can cheat on these numbers to a small extent if you must, since the price of a land entering tapped is lower than the price of not having the appropriate colors of mana to cast your spells on time (as the original numbers were calculated). Still, wherever realistically feasible, it's best to maximize your odds of satisfying time-sensitive gameplay requirements when building decks, because that way you have fewer losses due to the bad side of variance hitting you.
Two-Color Decks
Two-color decks are in an interesting bind. If your two colors form one of the five color pairs represented in Guilds of Ravnica's guilds, you're in luck: you get a playset of shocklands and a playset of checklands, meaning that you can pretty reliably play most spells in your two colors without having to resort to taplands, and your lands will virtually always enter untapped. (You can only ever have lands entering tapped if you keep a hand of all checklands, which is an extremely unlikely hand to have.)
However, there are several incentives to be in color pairings not represented by the five guilds in the upcoming set. For example:
Many of Ixalan's tribal themes were built into color combinations not represented by these guilds. The merfolk use UG, the vampires use BW, and the dinosaurs are based on GR (though dip into white). Pirates use UBR, but should be fine for fixing since that tricolor combination has two shocklands (see 3-color decks for more details). Dinosaurs have two shocklands, but both are white, which is a tertiary color in the tribe if not excluded; the default dinosaur deck is GR. These tribes suffer, since most of them look to be fairly aggressive, run somewhat low land counts, and use all their mana each turn, but they may have to dip into taplands to get consistent colored mana.
There are some multicolor cards returning which belong to a combination not supported by the shocklands. The most important example is Teferi, Hero of Dominaria, since there's no UW shockland to support him.
For these examples, you have a couple of options.
For the tribal decks in particular, using Unclaimed Territory may be necessary to get proper fixing without losing too much tempo. Your options as far as noncreature spells go will be limited if you go this route, but fortunately, these decks don't tend to rely very much on noncreature spells in general and have relaxed mana requirements for them.
For playing generically good cards like Teferi, you may need to splash one of his two colors as a third color in your base-two-color deck (see below).
If neither of those will do, then you will simply have to be conservative with your mana requirements. If you play a 24-land GR deck with no special lands like Unclaimed Territory, then you will have four duals and 20 basics, which if evenly split gives you 14 sources of each color -- reliable to cast early spells of either color -- or which can be distributed unevenly to support spells with 2-cost requirements (for example, a UW deck could focus on white to cast Lyra Dawnbringer reliably, by playing 12 Plains, 8 Islands, and 4 Glacial Fortress, and could splash blue for something like Raff Capashen, Ship's Mage with 12 blue sources.
Three-Color Decks
I'll cut right to the case and tell you which shards/wedges you can play and which ones you can't, and why. These are the playable combinations:
Why? These are the five 3-color combinations with more than one set of shocklands in them.
Three-color decks in Standard after all of the bans relied heavily upon playing two different cycling lands to get enough of the land types needed to support all of their checklands. For example, Esper Control (which is already somewhat conservative, being a UB deck splashing Teferi) plays all eight cycle lands in most lists, and Bant Nexus (which is also somewhat conservative, typically base-UG splashing white and also containing Gift of Paradise to fix colors) plays all eight, or close to all eight, as well. Three-color decks with only one cycling dual simply don't exist, or where they do crop up, are splashing as lightly as possible for the third color and are essentially two-color decks.
Obviously it's possible to support three colors with only one set of shocklands, but you generally have to be extremely careful with how lightly you splash. Most of you simply won't be so careful and will try to play an Esper deck with Settle the Wreckage, the new Cancel variant and Vraska's Contempt and then pull your hair out wondering why all your lands always enter tapped and why you never seem to have your colors lined up. There's a reason bud!
Alright, you read patiently to this point, here's your reward. Some sample manabases:
We have fourteen red sources, enough to cast any red spell that requires only one red mana. We have eighteen green sources, enough for any green spell that requires two green mana. This deck shouldn't try to play 1RR or even 2RR cards like Rekindling Phoenix. If you want to play Phoenix, you have to give up Ripjaw Raptor, and you should play 10 Mountain and 6 Forest.
Notice that we have sixteen lands that are either Forest or Mountain, so our Rootbound Crags should reliably enter untapped almost all the time.
If you keep your red splash to being Dinosaur spells only, then you can replace Timber Gorge with Unclaimed Territory, which means that you don't have to play four tapped lands.
I didn't have to play Tranquil Expanse here, if I were to be more conservative with my mana costs. But I wanted to demonstrate how you might be able to play dual cost cards of both colors in a two-color deck. If I didn't need to play Thrashing Brontodon and specifically didn't need two green mana until turn 4, then I could cut both Expanses for Plains and be completely fine. As it stands, we have nineteen green sources, enough for Brontodon on-curve, and sixteen white sources, enough for Lyra on-curve.
Notice that we have 19 lands which are either Forest or Plains or both, so our Temple Gardens are good to go.
The idea of this type of deck is that we are based around UB, and we have decided that Nicol Bolas is strong enough to be worth splashing for. We have one Mountain to cover against opponents with Field of Ruin trying to cut us off of red, but otherwise all of our red sources come from our dual lands. This maximizes our consistency since we get to play a lot of basic lands, maximizing our odds of our checklands entering untapped and our odds of curving out.
We have seventeen black sources, sixteen blue sources, and nine red sources. Nine red sources is a little low, but if our only red cards aren't being played until turns 4-5 and only require one red mana, we can get away with it (especially if we only play a few of them, like 3-4 copies of Nicol Bolas and maybe one copy of the new Ral planeswalker that costs 3UR). Our primary colors are blue and black, and we will have one mana of each type by turn 1-2, and two mana of each type around turn 4-5. If we need to play more intense mana costs (say, the new Cancel with surveil 1, which costs 1UU), then we can rearrange our lands to have fewer Dragonskull Summits and Swamps and more Islands and perhaps some copies of Sulfur Falls. We'll have to cut basics, which comes at a price, though.
Right now, our Dragonskull Summmits have fourteen lands of type Swamp or Mountain, which means they will be good to go by turn 2, and we have seventeen lands of type Swamp or Island for our Drowned Catacombs.
First of all, we aren't actually playing Cancel, but the new Cancel with surveil 1. Same mana cost so same example though.
You will notice that we have no basic Plains in the deck. This is because we are already cheating a little bit on mana requirements to make this manabase work in absence of the appropriate shocklands. Since we are probably playing a control deck that will see a lot of cards in successful games, we can afford to be a little bit vulnerable to Field of Ruin; we will eventually draw another white source. (Plus, with Search for Azcanta in our deck, our opponent would be crazy to burn Field on trying to color screw us, since it's their only out to a flipped Azcanta!)
We are still cheating though, as I said before. We have eight white sources, which is sufficient for a splashed Teferi. But we only have eighteen blue sources and sixteen black sources, when we normally would want 19 and 17. Not a big deal, but a relevant thing to remember when tuning a deck; consistency is important!
The bigger issue is that we have much lower counts of lands with the right land typing for our checklands than in other examples. Our Drowned Catacombs are fine, at fourteen lands of type Swamp or Island, thanks to the high number of basics. But our Glacial Fortresses are counting on just ten sources, since we have no basic Plains, and our Isolated Chapels are counting on a mere nine. This means our checklands will fairly frequently enter tapped, costing us crucial tempo in a format where the manabases are designed for high-tempo decks. Furthermore, most control decks play some number of utility lands, notably Field of Ruin; we don't get this luxury because our mana would just be too bad otherwise. And, as a final warning, we can't play any cards that require white mana if we need to play them before turn 4; we simply have far too few sources for that to work. Realistically, we may have to consider cutting Teferi or finding a way not to need 1UU on turn 3 and 2BB on turn 4, none of which are great options for us.
What's the lesson here? Be conservative with your mana costs, especially if you don't have multiple shocklands to smooth out your curve!
I hope this helps you out as you brew. One of the most frustrating aspects of brewing is messing up your mana and not knowing whether the spells you are so interested in playing are any good, since you end up with a bunch of non-games due to bad mana. Follow this guide and even if your mana bases don't come out perfectly, they should at least be functional enough for you to spend the bulk of your time figuring out whether your spells are good, which is the real fun in brewing. Don't get bogged down by the logistics. Happy brewing!
Well, I guess I was wrong. I guessed that Wizards would release a new set of dual lands this time around since I figured another go at the shocklands would be kind of stale. (That, and they're still relatively inexpensive, so not printing them again would mean more fodder down the line for future Masters sets.)
I guess that, while I am a bit disappointed seeing another batch of shocklands, I am grateful that the price of these things will absolutely plummet, and virtually everyone will be able to afford a set of these things without breaking the bank.
I don't think they're going to drop off by a lot. Consider that Standard legality will increase the demand for them. There are plenty of players who don't have shocklands yet and there's recent precedent (with the KTK fetches) of Standard demand causing a price spike. I think their comparatively higher availability will mean the price doesn't go up as much (and probably goes down overall) but I don't expect it to move all that much.
This is my current list.
4 Llanowar Elves
4 Stitcher's Supplier
4 Glowspore Shaman
2 Kraul Harpooner
4 Plaguecrafter
4 Jadelight Ranger
3 Ravenous Chupacabra
1 Josu Vess, Lich Knight
2 Izoni, Thousand-Eyed
2 Molderhulk
1 Arguel's Blood Fast
1 Vraska, Relic Seeker
3 Assassin's Trophy
2 Find // Finality
Lands (23)
4 Overgrown Tomb
4 Woodland Cemetery
3 Memorial to Folly
3 Swamp
9 Forest
4 Duress
1 Assassin's Trophy
2 Cast Down
1 Necrotic Wound
1 Golden Demise
1 Thrashing Brontodon
1 Ravenous Chupacabra
2 Vraska's Contempt
1 Vivien Reid
1 Molderhulk
Key interactions:
Cards to consider:
Key considerations:
I have not liked Charnel Troll at all. It's much harder to fuel than it appears to be, it taxes the graveyard so heavily that you can't use it as a meaningful resource for anything else, and the payoff is "just" an overstated 3-mana beater. It's really hard to find a way to play enough high-pressure cards to close out a game before Troll is a liability while still playing anemic enablers like Stitcher's Supplier to play Troll on-curve while still having enough total resources to do anything.
I think you have it dead backwards when you call Troll an Undergrowth payoff. It hurts all your other Undergrowth cards.
Here are the real Undergrowth payoffs in no particular order:
There are less important ones like Kraul Harpooner and ones I can't figure out like Mausoleum Secrets.
But you see how Charnel Troll messes with all of these? As a matter of fact, I would point-blank say that if you play Charnel Troll you cannot play any other Undergrowth effects. They all scale so drastically that even small incremental chewing is more disruptive than you'd think.
Creature - Goat Beast
First strike
Morph 1RR
When Battering Greathorn enters the battlefield or is flipped face-up, it deals damage equal to its power divided as you choose among any number of targets.
3/1
Al-Grunuk, the Lone Guardian 1WW
Legendary Creature - Camel
Vigilance, lifelink
When Al-Grunuk, the Last Dromedary attacks or blocks, it gets -1/-0 for each other attacking or blocking creature you control.
4/4
Next: Ironshell Beetle
4 Thief of Sanity
4 Rekindling Phoenix
2 Nicol Bolas, the Ravager
3 Doom Whisperer
Spells (21)
2 Arguel's Blood Fast
2 Shock
1 Cast Down
2 Essence Scatter
1 Fiery Cannonade
1 Price of Fame
4 Vraska's Contempt
2 Lava Coil
4 Thought Erasure
2 Notion Rain
4 Cinder Barrens
4 Dragonskull Summit
2 Drowned Catacomb
3 Sulfur Falls
4 Steam Vents
4 Watery Grave
1 Island
2 Mountain
2 Swamp
4 Duress
1 Shock
2 Disdainful Stroke
1 Essence Scatter
1 Lava Coil
2 Negate
2 Ritual of Soot
1 Ral, Izzet Viceroy
1 River's Rebuke
I still hate having to play Cinder Barrens, and it might be right to quit playing Rekindling Phoenix, max out on Bolas and play a couple more interactive spells, but if cutting Phoenix is wrong, I don't really wanna be right.... I keep running into decks that just don't have outs to it, and it has such a great stabilizing interaction with Temple of Aclazotz. Tough life.
Shock or Dead Weight is essential. I like that Shock isn't 100% dead against Teferi control, but in fairness, the number of times where it's worth a card are really low (it's basically just if they let Phoenix resolve on t4 to cast a draw spell and then untap and tuck a threat with Teferi). Shock being able to tag Tajic, Legion's Edge or Legion Warboss before combat is big game, but Dead Weight actually killing Adanto Vanguard is pretty big too. And although fringe, it's slightly easier to use Dead Weight in tandem with e.g. Lava Coil to bring down a Lyra Dawnbringer or Aurelia, Champion of Justice than it is to use Shock, since you can do it over separate turns. Whichever ends up being right, I'm not sure if I should play two or three copies maindeck. I've been leaning on two because I don't want too many dead cards vs attrition or control pseudo-mirrors. I'm still leaning toward Shock for the instant-speed applications, but both are good. You need one of them.
I'm struggling a bit with the rest of the interaction moving up from that to Vraska's Contempt. I really wish we had a card like Never // Return so Contempt wasn't the only out to planeswalkers (although it's worthy to note that planeswalkers are getting a lot weaker with the departure of KLD + AKH blocks; Teferi is the only real standout left), but since we don't, your intermediate removal between your 1cc interaction and Contempt really needs to cover the bases well. I'm thinking about going up on Essence Scatters accordingly.
1 Lazav, the Multifarious
4 Thief of Sanity
4 Rekindling Phoenix
2 Nicol Bolas, the Ravager // Nicol Bolas, the Arisen
3 Doom Whisperer
Spells (20)
2 Arguel's Blood Fast // Temple of Aclazotz
2 Shock
1 Essence Scatter
1 Lightning Strike
2 Fiery Cannonade
2 Ionize
4 Vraska's Contempt
4 Thought Erasure
2 Notion Rain
4 Steam Vents
4 Watery Grave
4 Dragonskull Summit
2 Drowned Catacomb
2 Sulfur Falls
4 Cinder Barrens
1 Island
3 Mountain
2 Swamp
4 Duress
1 Shock
2 Disdainful Stroke
1 Essence Scatter
3 Lava Coil
2 Negate
1 Fiery Cannonade
1 Ral, Izzet Viceroy
Sideboarding is a bit of a mess. These are the three commandments of the format for day 1:
1. Have a plan for W/x go-wide decks. Selesnya is great at getting 2+ pieces per card (whether by cheating on lands and playing District Guide to make land drops or literally making 2+ bodies per card with Emmara, Soul of the Accord), and Boros is great at making every last piece on the board relevant. The top of the curve of this Grixis deck is great at invalidating random leftover bodies, but you don't always get to them in a timely manner. Fiery Cannonade is quite good.
2. Have a plan for turn-2 Steel Leaf Champion. This deck isn't great at dealing with it, honestly. The four drops trade at an advantage, but that's two whole attacks from the Champ if you're on the draw. The maindeck copies of Shock are a concession to this possible start. I haven't figured out the best mix of interaction and threats yet. I may end up maindecking some copies of Lava Coil and shipping some of the miscellaneous spells to the sideboard or out of the list altogether. I just don't want to get rid of too many Ionize types of cards because...
3. Have a plan for creatureless Teferi, Hero of Dominaria control. This deck should actually be very good at beating Teferi control decks, I think. Thought Erasure is fantastic for setting up Thief of Sanity or creating windows to resolve a 4-drop, and playsets of Erasure and Vraska's Contempt plus a couple of Ionize give me a lot of ways to interact with Teferi. Arguel's Blood Fast and Notion Rain are great here too.
I don't think this list is "there" yet but if you're going to SCG Cincinnati to start the season and like this style of deck, I wholeheartedly endorse this as a good starting point and believe I've got the maindeck 80% right. Sideboarding and the final slots will come down to your testing.
Thief of Sanity is anything but. I think this card is better than Glint-Sleeve Siphoner even accounting for the increased mana cost. I was down on it earlier in the thread, but a lot of its value comes from (a) the t2 Thought Erasure -> t3 Thief earlygame sequence, and (b) whether or not Shock effects are widespread, both of which are hard to see on paper. I played with it and I think it's great now.
Doom Whisperer is great.
I've liked a couple copies of Lazav, the Multifarious. It's about like Omenspeaker in the early game, which is acceptable if unspectacular, but Lazav is an absolute monster topdeck late in the game, turning into Doom Whisperer to get some card filtering early and then switching gears to drawing cards as a clone of Thief of Sanity. And if you're straight UB and can manage to play Nightveil Predator and get one into your graveyard, then Lazav can do the old Scarab God "hold up Gearhulk" trick to protect himself from removal. I don't think Lazav is a 4-of, but as a 2-of he seems quite nice. You can round out the 2-spot on the curve with removal and Thought Erasure and Arguel's Blood Fast so no issues there.
The only hole that's left is at 4 mana. Nightveil Predator is still medium and I'd like something a bit better (although the synergy with Lazav is pretty nice). I really wish the mana would support Thought Erasure on 2 and Rekindling Phoenix on four.
Pretend you can play infinite rainbow lands, what creature curve would you play? The Merfolk Branchwalker + Jadelight Ranger + bombs core worked well before. I'm actually having the opposite problem you are -- Sultai has a ton of excellent spells and if you don't mind being heavier on green, can shore up the early game with those two + Brontodon, but I don't know what all of this is building up to. I'm a big buyer of Doom Whisperer, but if the next best card in the 4+ cc category is Nightveil Predator, I don't think I'm in.
Maybe it's planeswalkers? I've been dying to use Karn, Tezzeret and Treasure Map together, and it wouldn't be hard to slot in something like Chromatic Lantern to get Karn enough artifacts to play with.
Whatever it is, I think it needs to be something:
(a) threatening
(b) sidesteps removal or trades positively with it
Whisperer lets you convert life into filtering at a nice rate so you're not completely down on cards, and beats the hell out of the enemy if it isn't removed immediately, so I like that. The planeswalkers get some value in the face of removal. Once we're in the realm of Thief of Sanity (dangerous if unchecked, but has to connect before it does anything) or the Predator (just not threatening enough for its mana cost; nice set of keywords, good rate overall, but the rate is tied up in things that don't generate value or put a real clock on the enemy), I'm not liking it so much...
Wrong colors obviously but Rekindling Phoenix and Nicol Bolas, the Ravager look like great 4cc creatures to play right now. Is there anything comparable in Sultai?
(complicated tangent incoming)
All correct, though you should note that Gift is being counted "extra" because it specifically makes the land enchanted tap for two mana of any one color. Something like Unbridled Growth should only be counted as one source because it only makes one mana of any color. Also, be careful as to how you account sources like Unbridled Growth. If you have only ten lands that make green mana, then counting Unbridled Growth as a green source to get to the requisite 14 green sources to cast Unbridled Growth, or Attune with Aether (RIP), etc. is circular and faulty, since you already must have the green source to cast Growth in the first place. You may, however, count Growth as green sources for the purposes of casting, say, a 2GG spell like Bristling Hydra, since you could cast Hydra off of Forest, Plains, Plains, Island by enchanting a non-Forest land with Growth.
(/tangent)
And yes, the double mana requirements are important. I left them out of the initial post because I wanted to focus on the shockland/checkland interactions, which need only one land of the appropriate type. But when constructing any manabase you must take those requirements into account for making sure you can actually cast your spells.
Kind of. The adjustments for ramp spells are pretty straightforward to make, though a bit complicated to explain in writing. They're related enough that they should be discussed here. Good catch.
Don't be obtuse. Deltas were sitting around $10 for a year before BFZ introduced battle lands. The battle land + fetchland interaction made them ubiquitous in Standard and they jumped back up to $20. The point is that Standard demand is a significant factor in price even when accounting for recent increases in supply of cards that everyone "should" be picking up (one common argument is that prices won't rise because everyone "should" have shocklands already).
I expect shockland prices to go up from Standard demand, like the checklands that were reprinted in Ixalan did -- there were many printings of them before Ixalan, but the increase in demand from Standard was enough to push the prices up anyway. Very similar situation here. In the longer run when the shocklands aren't Standard legal, then this reprinting will of course drop their price compared to where it was before the reprint was announced tonight.
Reminds me of the Ajani art with Elspeth's cloak. It's the Brotherhood of the Traveling Cloak
minuteshours ago (this took a while to write lol!) that five of the ten iconic shocklands will be reprinted in Guilds of Ravnica: Sacred Foundry, Watery Grave, Overgrown Tomb, Steam Vents, and Temple Garden.After Kaladesh and Amonkhet rotate, we will be left with three types of dual lands in Standard:
Let's start with the taplands. These are generally not good enough for competitive play. If you need them as a budget option, you do you, but they should very rarely be seen in competitive decks - at most as a 1-2 of for decks with very intensive costs in two colors.
The checklands and shocklands have strong synergy, like the Amonkhet cycling cycle had with the checklands. Most of the numbers for building manabases are already pretty easy to derive from the current format, and I'll go over them in a minute, but the first thing to focus in on is the differences between the cycling cycle and the shocklands. The shocklands can come into play untapped and cannot be cycled. This implies two things:
(1) If the spells exist to create it, the mana supports a faster format. Curve considerations will be more important because your opponents are not going to miss a beat from stumbling on tapped lands very often. The checklands will almost always enter untapped and the shocklands will always enter untapped if your opponent needs them to do so.
(2) You have fewer ways to mitigate mana flood in the later game. Decks that played cycle lands typically played one more land than they normally would for the same cmc/curve profile. You will probably see about one fewer land than before, or if people continue to play the same land counts, good mana sinks will be a higher priority than before, since you don't have mana sinks built into your lands.
Now some numbers. Thanks to Frank Karsten, writing for Channel Fireball: How many sources of mana do you need to cast your spells?
This article was written with mana fixing in mind, but we can adapt the numbers for shocks/checks analysis. After all, the hypergeometric distribution used to get those numbers is just as valid for finding certain colors at a certain time as it is for finding certain land types at a certain time.
The relevant table in list form - using 90% as the threshold of reliability:
You'll find that some successful tournament decks last season cheated on these numbers a bit or used certain spells (notably Attune with Aether, before it was banned) to fix their land counts and curve out properly. You can cheat on these numbers to a small extent if you must, since the price of a land entering tapped is lower than the price of not having the appropriate colors of mana to cast your spells on time (as the original numbers were calculated). Still, wherever realistically feasible, it's best to maximize your odds of satisfying time-sensitive gameplay requirements when building decks, because that way you have fewer losses due to the bad side of variance hitting you.
Two-Color Decks
Two-color decks are in an interesting bind. If your two colors form one of the five color pairs represented in Guilds of Ravnica's guilds, you're in luck: you get a playset of shocklands and a playset of checklands, meaning that you can pretty reliably play most spells in your two colors without having to resort to taplands, and your lands will virtually always enter untapped. (You can only ever have lands entering tapped if you keep a hand of all checklands, which is an extremely unlikely hand to have.)
However, there are several incentives to be in color pairings not represented by the five guilds in the upcoming set. For example:
For these examples, you have a couple of options.
Three-Color Decks
I'll cut right to the case and tell you which shards/wedges you can play and which ones you can't, and why. These are the playable combinations:
WRU Jeskai
GWR Naya
WGB Abzan
GBU Sultai
RUB Grixis
Why? These are the five 3-color combinations with more than one set of shocklands in them.
Three-color decks in Standard after all of the bans relied heavily upon playing two different cycling lands to get enough of the land types needed to support all of their checklands. For example, Esper Control (which is already somewhat conservative, being a UB deck splashing Teferi) plays all eight cycle lands in most lists, and Bant Nexus (which is also somewhat conservative, typically base-UG splashing white and also containing Gift of Paradise to fix colors) plays all eight, or close to all eight, as well. Three-color decks with only one cycling dual simply don't exist, or where they do crop up, are splashing as lightly as possible for the third color and are essentially two-color decks.
Obviously it's possible to support three colors with only one set of shocklands, but you generally have to be extremely careful with how lightly you splash. Most of you simply won't be so careful and will try to play an Esper deck with Settle the Wreckage, the new Cancel variant and Vraska's Contempt and then pull your hair out wondering why all your lands always enter tapped and why you never seem to have your colors lined up. There's a reason bud!
Alright, you read patiently to this point, here's your reward. Some sample manabases:
1 Ripjaw Raptor
1 Lightning Strike
4 Timber Gorge
10 Forest
6 Mountain
We have fourteen red sources, enough to cast any red spell that requires only one red mana. We have eighteen green sources, enough for any green spell that requires two green mana. This deck shouldn't try to play 1RR or even 2RR cards like Rekindling Phoenix. If you want to play Phoenix, you have to give up Ripjaw Raptor, and you should play 10 Mountain and 6 Forest.
Notice that we have sixteen lands that are either Forest or Mountain, so our Rootbound Crags should reliably enter untapped almost all the time.
If you keep your red splash to being Dinosaur spells only, then you can replace Timber Gorge with Unclaimed Territory, which means that you don't have to play four tapped lands.
1 Thrashing Brontodon
4 Sunpetal Grove
2 Tranquil Expanse
9 Forest
6 Plains
I didn't have to play Tranquil Expanse here, if I were to be more conservative with my mana costs. But I wanted to demonstrate how you might be able to play dual cost cards of both colors in a two-color deck. If I didn't need to play Thrashing Brontodon and specifically didn't need two green mana until turn 4, then I could cut both Expanses for Plains and be completely fine. As it stands, we have nineteen green sources, enough for Brontodon on-curve, and sixteen white sources, enough for Lyra on-curve.
Notice that we have 19 lands which are either Forest or Plains or both, so our Temple Gardens are good to go.
1 Vraska's Contempt
1 Tezzeret, Artifice Master
4 Steam Vents
4 Dragonskull Summit
4 Drowned Catacomb
5 Swamp
4 Island
1 Mountain
The idea of this type of deck is that we are based around UB, and we have decided that Nicol Bolas is strong enough to be worth splashing for. We have one Mountain to cover against opponents with Field of Ruin trying to cut us off of red, but otherwise all of our red sources come from our dual lands. This maximizes our consistency since we get to play a lot of basic lands, maximizing our odds of our checklands entering untapped and our odds of curving out.
We have seventeen black sources, sixteen blue sources, and nine red sources. Nine red sources is a little low, but if our only red cards aren't being played until turns 4-5 and only require one red mana, we can get away with it (especially if we only play a few of them, like 3-4 copies of Nicol Bolas and maybe one copy of the new Ral planeswalker that costs 3UR). Our primary colors are blue and black, and we will have one mana of each type by turn 1-2, and two mana of each type around turn 4-5. If we need to play more intense mana costs (say, the new Cancel with surveil 1, which costs 1UU), then we can rearrange our lands to have fewer Dragonskull Summits and Swamps and more Islands and perhaps some copies of Sulfur Falls. We'll have to cut basics, which comes at a price, though.
Right now, our Dragonskull Summmits have fourteen lands of type Swamp or Mountain, which means they will be good to go by turn 2, and we have seventeen lands of type Swamp or Island for our Drowned Catacombs.
1 Vraska's Contempt
1 Cancel
4 Isolated Chapel
4 Glacial Fortress
4 Drowned Catacomb
6 Island
4 Swamp
First of all, we aren't actually playing Cancel, but the new Cancel with surveil 1. Same mana cost so same example though.
You will notice that we have no basic Plains in the deck. This is because we are already cheating a little bit on mana requirements to make this manabase work in absence of the appropriate shocklands. Since we are probably playing a control deck that will see a lot of cards in successful games, we can afford to be a little bit vulnerable to Field of Ruin; we will eventually draw another white source. (Plus, with Search for Azcanta in our deck, our opponent would be crazy to burn Field on trying to color screw us, since it's their only out to a flipped Azcanta!)
We are still cheating though, as I said before. We have eight white sources, which is sufficient for a splashed Teferi. But we only have eighteen blue sources and sixteen black sources, when we normally would want 19 and 17. Not a big deal, but a relevant thing to remember when tuning a deck; consistency is important!
The bigger issue is that we have much lower counts of lands with the right land typing for our checklands than in other examples. Our Drowned Catacombs are fine, at fourteen lands of type Swamp or Island, thanks to the high number of basics. But our Glacial Fortresses are counting on just ten sources, since we have no basic Plains, and our Isolated Chapels are counting on a mere nine. This means our checklands will fairly frequently enter tapped, costing us crucial tempo in a format where the manabases are designed for high-tempo decks. Furthermore, most control decks play some number of utility lands, notably Field of Ruin; we don't get this luxury because our mana would just be too bad otherwise. And, as a final warning, we can't play any cards that require white mana if we need to play them before turn 4; we simply have far too few sources for that to work. Realistically, we may have to consider cutting Teferi or finding a way not to need 1UU on turn 3 and 2BB on turn 4, none of which are great options for us.
What's the lesson here? Be conservative with your mana costs, especially if you don't have multiple shocklands to smooth out your curve!
I hope this helps you out as you brew. One of the most frustrating aspects of brewing is messing up your mana and not knowing whether the spells you are so interested in playing are any good, since you end up with a bunch of non-games due to bad mana. Follow this guide and even if your mana bases don't come out perfectly, they should at least be functional enough for you to spend the bulk of your time figuring out whether your spells are good, which is the real fun in brewing. Don't get bogged down by the logistics. Happy brewing!
I don't think they're going to drop off by a lot. Consider that Standard legality will increase the demand for them. There are plenty of players who don't have shocklands yet and there's recent precedent (with the KTK fetches) of Standard demand causing a price spike. I think their comparatively higher availability will mean the price doesn't go up as much (and probably goes down overall) but I don't expect it to move all that much.