I know this is gonna sound dumb but I actually didn't think that boomerang was legal in modern. Turn 2 boomerang into turn 3 LD is pretty brutal especially on the play against a CiPT land so that definitely belongs. If i replace remands, then every card in the deck is proactive. The list would then look something like this:
The question now is if you double down on the turn 2 bounce a land play by adding in Eye of Nowhere. At this point the only cards left to strip out for more bounce is unsubstantiate and silent departure, IMO.
I like that fevered visions can be both card draw and a win con but I don't like the prospects of giving the opposition more cards. Could definitely be worth testing though, as having another turn to do yet more LD on them before they can play the extra land they draw at endstep has some upside...
Not sure if anyone's played a deck like this already of if there's already a thread for it (if so, feel free to direct me...) but yeah, this plays pretty linearly and consistently achieves its primary goal: annihilating all manabases. Open to any feedback.
You can cast the sorcery side of Commit with the Torrential Gearhulk flashback trigger. I don't think it's only for super fast decks or combo decks. If anything, I'd feel it's almost exclusively for grindy control decks. If a control deck has many pieces of permission, than being able to recycle all your counters is huge. The backside of Commit being cast and having so many lands that you have 4+ mana open afterwards puts the control player pretty far ahead. Most of the time you should hit a land drop every turn, your opponent most likely won't (archetype dependent) and they'll be bottle-necked on what they can play. You can just shoot down every spell you care about after that.
A Torrential Gearhulk will eventually come down and they'll have less resources to work with than you. They'll have to start moving into chump block mode after taking 10 or so, and the game is pretty academic at that point.
Exactly. Anytime you're ahead on permanents, Timetwister is value and as a control deck, you'll often be ahead on permanents right after casting a sweeper of some kind.
To clarify: you can cast the sorcery side of Commit with gearhulk at opponent's EOT, right? If you can do that right after an Engulf the Shores, I think that should close out most games.
I've heard that it's legal for you to cast the memory side of commit//memory when you flash it back with gearhulk. EOT timetwister seems totally insane if that's actually legal...
With a manabase like that, I can't imagine very many situations where Port Town would come into play tapped. Add 4 of those and you have 12 white sources... some number of Cast Out or Blessed Alliance could easily fit.
This is what I want to build and test. As a veteran of Rift-Slide and Eternal Slide I would really like to see another workable cycling deck in standard so naturally I'm pretty hot on drake haven.
I think that this deck will have to embrace Blood Moon in order to deal with Tron and Valakut. 4 ghost quarters might get there against tron some of the time, but there is no real way to interact with a scapeshift or titan and their Valakut plan kills much much faster than Seismic Assault. That said, the value to be gained with fetches is a big part of the loam engine, so the deck does lose a little bit of steam under moon. I think a way to compensate for this is to go off the top of the library with cards like courser of kruphix and oracle of mul daya
The alternative would be to build around black and cards like Smallpox and Death Cloud as the disruption package. This is much harder to do as there aren't any enemy bicycle lands yet. You do gain zombie infestation though, which is pretty sweet.
Drake haven, which creates 2/2 flyers every time you cycle or discard also looks pretty nuckin futs.
Magus of the Scroll could also work; I could see either of them fitting into a build that also runs Reckoners, as their instant speed damage is highly synergistic with his first striking. Lavamancers could also go into a build that eschewed scrying sheets for fetchlands to stack the 'yard...which also fits with Reckoner as RRR could clash with your third land drop being a colorless sheet.
Jus wondering, is there any reason why lavamancer doesn't see any play with this deck? I've only been playing modern for a month but it's one of my favorite cards and it doesn't seem bad vs the format
Turn 3 chandra into roast, mortars, pyroclasm or two bolts/skred is super hot. I've found her to be as good as Koth in most cases, though Koth being able to win faster still makes him overall a little better on the balance. yet, the fact that Koth is bad in multiples whereas multiple Chandras are very valuable has led me to run them on a 3-3 split. before arriving on this list I ran a build with 4 koth, 4 Chandra, 2 batterskull and no P&K--that was a bit of a disaster, as my lack of chumps/time buyers was exposed in Merfolk and Eldrazi matchups that I lost really badly. Now that I got P&K back in the line up the deck is very, very good and I'm undefeated so far.
I've never played GDD, but on the surface to me it seems like Chandra, P&K and Koth are all much better as they're resistant to removal and have more flexibility to respond to a number of different situations.
has anyone looked at Pia Nalaar? Breathing fire into thopters could allow for taking down planeswalkers faster or trading them up for larger creatures...could be relevant or awfully corner case, especially when compared to the upside of say eternal scourge? Just thinking aloud.
2 Mountain
2 Steam Vents
4 Scalding Tarn
3 Misty Rainforest
1 Arid Mesa
4 Sulfur Falls
3 Goblin Dark-Dwellers
3 Blood Moon
4 Spreading Seas
4 Stone Rain
4 Molten Rain
4 Serum Visions
2 Silent Departure
3 Unsubstantiate
4 Lightning Bolt
The question now is if you double down on the turn 2 bounce a land play by adding in Eye of Nowhere. At this point the only cards left to strip out for more bounce is unsubstantiate and silent departure, IMO.
2 Mountain
2 Steam Vents
4 Scalding Tarn
3 Misty Rainforest
1 Arid Mesa
4 Sulfur Falls
3 Goblin Dark-Dwellers
3 Blood Moon
4 Spreading Seas
4 Stone Rain
4 Molten Rain
4 Serum Visions
2 Silent Departure
3 Remand
4 Lightning Bolt
2 Magma Jet
Not sure if anyone's played a deck like this already of if there's already a thread for it (if so, feel free to direct me...) but yeah, this plays pretty linearly and consistently achieves its primary goal: annihilating all manabases. Open to any feedback.
Exactly. Anytime you're ahead on permanents, Timetwister is value and as a control deck, you'll often be ahead on permanents right after casting a sweeper of some kind.
To clarify: you can cast the sorcery side of Commit with gearhulk at opponent's EOT, right? If you can do that right after an Engulf the Shores, I think that should close out most games.
4 Plains
3 Fetid Pools
4 Irrigated Farmland
4 Prairie Stream
4 Port Town
3 Void Shatter
3 Failure // Comply
1 Unsubstantiate
4 Censor
3 Forsake the Worldly
2 Renewed Faith
4 Hieroglyphic Illumination
4 Drake Haven
3 Fumigate
I haven't played any standard at all so I have no real impression of what the meta could be like other than what I've read on these forums.
The alternative would be to build around black and cards like Smallpox and Death Cloud as the disruption package. This is much harder to do as there aren't any enemy bicycle lands yet. You do gain zombie infestation though, which is pretty sweet.
Drake haven, which creates 2/2 flyers every time you cycle or discard also looks pretty nuckin futs.
That, or they could make an Ice Age 2 set. Actually, they should combine with Eldrazi and make a set called Eldrazi Winter.
4 Scrying Sheets
3 Blood Moon
3 Relic of Progenitus
4 Mind Stone
1 Batterskull
2 Eternal Scourge
3 Pia and Kiran Nalaar
3 Chandra, Torch of Defiance
4 Skred
4 Lightning Bolt
1 Roast
2 Pyroclasm
2 Mizzium Mortars
2 Anger of the Gods
1 Relic of Progenitus
1 Batterskull
2 Pyrite Spellbomb
2 Sudden Shock
3 Stone Rain
4 Dragon Claw
1 Vandalblast
1 Shattering Spree
Turn 3 chandra into roast, mortars, pyroclasm or two bolts/skred is super hot. I've found her to be as good as Koth in most cases, though Koth being able to win faster still makes him overall a little better on the balance. yet, the fact that Koth is bad in multiples whereas multiple Chandras are very valuable has led me to run them on a 3-3 split. before arriving on this list I ran a build with 4 koth, 4 Chandra, 2 batterskull and no P&K--that was a bit of a disaster, as my lack of chumps/time buyers was exposed in Merfolk and Eldrazi matchups that I lost really badly. Now that I got P&K back in the line up the deck is very, very good and I'm undefeated so far.
I've never played GDD, but on the surface to me it seems like Chandra, P&K and Koth are all much better as they're resistant to removal and have more flexibility to respond to a number of different situations.