I just placed first in FNM for the second time with this deck, getting a third turn kill in the final round against Jund. It feels like it still needs improvement, however. I made this to try and fight aggro as fast aggro is very popular in my area. Works pretty well in that regard. Wondering if anyone out there can suggest ways to improve this, make it more consistent.
Turn four and turn five kills are common, yet it can race aggro through lifegain and keep up with control in card advantage. I'm wondering through -- should I ditch Messenger and go with Predator Ooze instead? He'd function as Lotleth Troll #2, being another incredibly resilient beater that gets out of hand quick.
Basically, the idea -- swing with efficient Rancor'd beats, ping with Messenger and Artist, draw cards/gain life with Disciple and/or finish off with a 6-10 point Essence Harvest.
Alternatively,
Against RDW/Boros or anything without exile/bounce removal, dump all of your creatures into a Lotleth Troll, swing, Essence Harvest and / or Disciple it when they're almost dead.
In the spirit of Ghost Dad, Turbo Zombies is a resilient tempo deck with many tricks. Disciple of Bolas and Essence Harvest are major bombs here, generating substantial CA and life swings. Gravecrawler, Bloodthrone Vampire and Blood Artist compliment them, forming the deck's core.
Why Turbo Zombies?
11 sources of lifegain allow you to race against aggro, and the resilient nature of many of its cards helps against control. Of course, the biggest reason is its fun factor. In any given game there are usually many possibilities, and combat can get pretty tricky.
Geralf's Messenger—— Plows through with Rancor, gives substantial reach (especially with a Blood Artist on the table) and can provide a ton of cards with Disciple.
Bloodthrone Vampire—— Beyond the benefits of having a free and instant sac ability, he's great with Rancor and Gravecrawler. Can get huge for a massive Disciple sac. Can swing for a ton of damage then power out a 10+ point Essence Harvest. Has synergy with almost every card in the deck.
Gravecrawler—— Gets in early beats, especially with Rancor. Creates inevitability with Blood Artist/Bloodthrone. Becomes ridiculous and bomby with Bloodthrone, Rancor and Essence Harvest.
Lotleth Troll—— His potentially high power allows for huge Essence Drains or even Disciple fodder. Gravecrawler and Slitherhead make him pretty beefy.
Slitherhead—— In this deck, he's a 1/1 that you can exile from your graveyard for free for not only a +1/+1 counter but to gain one life and draw a card, or drain the opponent for one. Also, he's a zombie, so he enables Gravecrawler spam. Also has obvious synergy with Lotleth Troll.
Giant Growth—— So far in testing, it's super amazing. Counters burn and helps plow through with Rancor for last bit of damage. Combos with both Disciple and Harvest to draw extra cards and gain more life in addition to doing more damage. Versatile and cheap.
This is still pretty unrefined, but it's interesting and I think it has potential. If anyone wants to help develop, I'd love to hear suggestions for improvements. Thanks for reading!
8 MB answers for anything
Blind Obedience for lifegain, anti-aggro
Underworld for draw
Stab Wound/Lashes for more removal and wincons
Drownyard for additional wincon
Maybe take out a few enchantments for instant speed removal or something. Someone got first at FNM with a build like this and never lost one game :/
edit: forgot to mention, D Sphere also serves as a token hoser, so it's got almost all bases covered beyond shroud creatures (which Safety can eventually nullify)
Kinda comboish, sweeper resistant, swing in for early beats and drain later. Messenger + BT + BA is a 12 point life swing, Essence Harvest randomly wins games.
I've been playing a list similar to this on MWS with impressive results.
It's using Vizkopa Guildmage and Blood Artist. They are so insanely strong together, it's ridiculous. Someone is going to make a breakout deck using those two cards, I'm sure.
I posted a list similar to this and no one commented on it, but it's beastly.
You want Immortal Servitude and bump up the number of two-drops. They kill your Blood Artists? Bring them back along with all your other weenies, chump block and sac.
This deck has been having moderate success on MWS, going even with all of the aggro and midrange lists floating around (Boros, Jund, etc). I don't know why it works, it just does.
Its gameplay is weird, with lots of synergy and interactions reminiscent of the old Ghost Dad deck. Combos come out of nowhere. One second, you're idling along, playing your mediocre weenies, the next, the opponent is taking 10+ damage.
If you feel like helping me test out, then great. (Just posting this for anyone wanting to try something different)
3 Vault of the Archangel
7 Plains
5 Swamp
4 Isolated Chapel
4 Godless Shrine
4 Blood Artist -- obviously awesome
4 Butcher Ghoul -- combos with blood artist, aristocrat, and thrull
2 Loyal Cathar/Unhallowed Cathar -- because more butcher ghouls are a good thing
4 Nearheath Pilgrim -- super lifelink, combos with guildmage
4 Cartel Aristocrat -- always block, never die, combos with blood artist
4 Thrull Parasite -- additional drain, combos with butcher
4 Vizkopa Guildmage -- finisher, combos with blood artist, vault and blood artist
1 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben -- because why not?
2 Skirsdag High Priest -- "use my incinerate on the blood artist, or this guy?"
4 Immortal Servitude -- if you have two blood artists in GY and several creatures you just autowin if you cast this, nuff said
4 Tragic Slip -- in this deck, best single target removal in T2
//Sideboard
4 Keening Apparition -- anti RIP tech... maybe 4 war priests too? oh, look, both are 2/2 with 2 CMC?
11 ???
Alright, it doesn't really look like much at first, but many of my opponents on MWS have said it's frustrating to play against and they totally underestimated what it can do.
Things to note: 1) Mid and late game, Guildmage combos with Pilgrim, Vault, and Blood Artist for huge damage.
Guildmage+Pilgrim = 4 damage on top of 4 normal damage on top of the lifelink
Guildmage+Vault = Tons of damage
Guildmage+Blood Artist = Tons of damage
2) Thrull Parasite not only gives synergy with Blood Artist, but can remove the counters on Butcher. This gives you additional blocks, and it can be used after raising all of your dudes for an additional sac chump. Example: 2 Blood Artists are in play. Opponent has 10 health. With the Thrull, you can sac one Butcher Ghoul 3 times for a total of 6 damage to the opponent. If you have a Guildmage in play, tap 3 mana to turn that into 12 damage. Or 6 mana for 18 damage.
4) Cartel Aristocrat is a god. He's insanely useful. He makes it hard for weenies to attack, he chumps fatties, he's a nigh-unkillable sac outlet, and he allows you to deal those last few points after you've drained them for a few turns. Also plinks Planeswalkers.
5) In this deck, Tragic Slip is hyper efficient and basically reads "B: Kill target creature".
6) Not much removal it seems. They usually cannot kill your Blood Artist after you recur.
4x Blood Artist
4x Cartel Artistocrat
4x High Priest of Penance
4x Butcher Ghoul
4x Vizkopa Guildmage
4x Augus of Bolas
4x Alchemist's Apprentice
4x Screeching Skaab (weakest thing on the list... Snapcaster instead?)
4x Immortal Servitude
Step 1) Play your bears, beat if possible.
Step 2) Stall for as long as you can, doing as much damage as possible. Against control, you can often manage to get an Aristocrat, Blood Artist and Guildmage on the table. If you do, activate Guildmage at EOT to drain them for a lot, then IS on your turn for the win.
Step 3) Failing that, run IS when after you've sacrificed most of your army as speedbumps and they are mostly in the graveyard. If you have a Guildmage on the table, wait until your next turn to drain. If they sweep on their turn, then of course sac everything to Aristocrat.
Activating Aristocrat twice makes a single Blood Artist drain for 3 with each sac. Realistically, expect to activate it once with two BAs on the table. That's still more than enough to kill.
This can go toe-to-toe with tier one decks -- UNTIL they side in hate, that is.
I thought tempo decks were all about speeding up your game while slowing down the opponents? (Read that in an article about Ghost Dad, my favorite deck ever, on the Wizards site)
BTW digging the deck idea, I've been thinking about RUG too for tempo. Although just from looking at this list, it seems like you'll run out of gas unless you go crazy with Druid/Nivmagus... what about adding more beats?
Goal of the database isn't to "win a tournament". It's to provide a free website that will have tons of statistics for every deck/card. To give mtg players an edge in tournaments
Hagalaz is correct. The AI problem is much, much harder than you realize. You don't know how much you don't know.
Try something simpler first. Design an AI to play a mono-colored deck with vanilla creatures and no spells against another copy of the same deck.
This is still a very hard problem.
I'm a javascript and website developer who has been programming for over 10 years. (I'm 30)
As for the AI, I already have it -- my friend was working on it a long time ago, so he just gave me his code. I made it better, near flawless really, and modified it to play itself and update the MySQL DB with the results of each game.
It plays about 1 million games each day if I just let the program run all day.
I'm just looking for other people who wouldn't mind sharing the workload and helping get this project truly perfect as it's a ton of work for a single person.
And how will you code the AI for it? Are you going to brute force it? Heuristic searches? Alpha-beta cuts? If you're gonna be thorough it will take many years to get a standard deck, by which time it will no longer be legal, and if not, it will not be realistic towards the play skill of the best pros.
Hell, even if you do go thorough, there's plenty of interaction, bluffing and metagaming that would make your work go down the drain. Why do you want the best deck if the metagame is all full of decks strong against it, even if they are less efficient?
Well, about 10 million games can be played every week. The program updates the database with the findings. The purpose is to show "deck X has a Y% win rate against deck Z over a bajillion games".
Can also get card-specific. "Deck X using card Y instead of card Z wins more games overall."
I'm currently working on a program and database website for MTG. The goal of this program is to provide an extremely complex database for MTG cards -- to be specific, the inherent power of each card/deck.
What the program does:
The program will take all available T2 cards and randomly create a deck with them. At first, the decks will be haphazard random piles of junk. The program will have these random piles of junk "duel" each other. The winning deck's cards will be assigned a positive score while the losing cards will be assigned a negative score. Right now, the program is slowly creating its own T2 decks which are vaguely similar to the latest tier 1 decks -- within another two weeks, I am sure the program will end up with decks that are equal to or superior to the pro decks in every way.
In other words, over millions of simulated games, the program will create decks and record the win/loss statistics of each deck. Therefor, players will be able to know which decks currently have the greatest chance of winning, and also, a deck's win percentage against another deck.
Are there any programmers out there interested in helping me with this?
4 Overgrown Tomb
4 Woodland Cemetery
4 Golgari Guildgate
4 Slitherhead
4 Gravecrawler
4 Geralf's Messenger
4 Disciple of Bolas
4 Bloodthrone Vampire
3 Blood Artist
3 Giant Growth
3 Essence Harvest
Turn four and turn five kills are common, yet it can race aggro through lifegain and keep up with control in card advantage. I'm wondering through -- should I ditch Messenger and go with Predator Ooze instead? He'd function as Lotleth Troll #2, being another incredibly resilient beater that gets out of hand quick.
Basically, the idea -- swing with efficient Rancor'd beats, ping with Messenger and Artist, draw cards/gain life with Disciple and/or finish off with a 6-10 point Essence Harvest.
Alternatively,
Against RDW/Boros or anything without exile/bounce removal, dump all of your creatures into a Lotleth Troll, swing, Essence Harvest and / or Disciple it when they're almost dead.
Gimme ur thoughts/suggestions for improvement.
What is Turbo Zombies?
In the spirit of Ghost Dad, Turbo Zombies is a resilient tempo deck with many tricks. Disciple of Bolas and Essence Harvest are major bombs here, generating substantial CA and life swings. Gravecrawler, Bloodthrone Vampire and Blood Artist compliment them, forming the deck's core.
Why Turbo Zombies?
11 sources of lifegain allow you to race against aggro, and the resilient nature of many of its cards helps against control. Of course, the biggest reason is its fun factor. In any given game there are usually many possibilities, and combat can get pretty tricky.
Example Deck List (3/14/2013)
11 Swamp
4 Overgrown Tomb
4 Woodland Cemetery
4 Golgari Guildgate
4 Lotleth Troll
4 Slitherhead
4 Gravecrawler
3 Blood Artist
4 Geralf's Messenger
4 Disciple of Bolas
4 Bloodthrone Vampire
4 Rancor
3 Giant Growth
3 Essence Harvest
Card Choices
Geralf's Messenger —— Plows through with Rancor, gives substantial reach (especially with a Blood Artist on the table) and can provide a ton of cards with Disciple.
Bloodthrone Vampire —— Beyond the benefits of having a free and instant sac ability, he's great with Rancor and Gravecrawler. Can get huge for a massive Disciple sac. Can swing for a ton of damage then power out a 10+ point Essence Harvest. Has synergy with almost every card in the deck.
Gravecrawler —— Gets in early beats, especially with Rancor. Creates inevitability with Blood Artist/Bloodthrone. Becomes ridiculous and bomby with Bloodthrone, Rancor and Essence Harvest.
Lotleth Troll —— His potentially high power allows for huge Essence Drains or even Disciple fodder. Gravecrawler and Slitherhead make him pretty beefy.
Slitherhead —— In this deck, he's a 1/1 that you can exile from your graveyard for free for not only a +1/+1 counter but to gain one life and draw a card, or drain the opponent for one. Also, he's a zombie, so he enables Gravecrawler spam. Also has obvious synergy with Lotleth Troll.
Giant Growth —— So far in testing, it's super amazing. Counters burn and helps plow through with Rancor for last bit of damage. Combos with both Disciple and Harvest to draw extra cards and gain more life in addition to doing more damage. Versatile and cheap.
Rancor —— Obvious synergy.
This is still pretty unrefined, but it's interesting and I think it has potential. If anyone wants to help develop, I'd love to hear suggestions for improvements. Thanks for reading!
2 Nephalia Drownyard
4 Hallowed Fountain
4 Glacial Fortress
4 Isolated Chapel
4 Godless Shrine
4 Drowned Catacomb
3 Watery Grave
4 Sensory Deprivation
4 Underworld Connections
4 Blind Obedience
4 Pacifism
4 Oblivion Ring
3 Stab Wound
4 One Thousand Lashes
4 Detention Sphere
4 Sphere of Safety
8 MB answers for anything
Blind Obedience for lifegain, anti-aggro
Underworld for draw
Stab Wound/Lashes for more removal and wincons
Drownyard for additional wincon
Maybe take out a few enchantments for instant speed removal or something. Someone got first at FNM with a build like this and never lost one game :/
edit: forgot to mention, D Sphere also serves as a token hoser, so it's got almost all bases covered beyond shroud creatures (which Safety can eventually nullify)
3 Forest
9 Swamp
4 Golgari Guildgate
4 Woodland Cemetery
4 Overgrown Tomb
4 Butcher Ghoul
4 Strangleroot Geist
4 Geralf's Messenger
4 Falkenrath Noble
4 Young Wolf
4 Blood Artist
4 Bloodthrone Vampire
4 Essence Harvest
4 Rancor
Kinda comboish, sweeper resistant, swing in for early beats and drain later. Messenger + BT + BA is a 12 point life swing, Essence Harvest randomly wins games.
4 Temple Garden
4 Godless Shrine
4 Isolated Chapel
4 Woodland Cemetery
4 Overgrown Tomb
4 Vizkopa Guildmage
4 Blood Artist
4 Cartel Aristocrat
4 Nearheath Pilgrim
4 Skirsdag High Priest
4 Mayor of Avabruck/Howlpack Alpha
4 Hamlet Captain
4 Immortal Servitude
4 Rancor
It's using Vizkopa Guildmage and Blood Artist. They are so insanely strong together, it's ridiculous. Someone is going to make a breakout deck using those two cards, I'm sure.
Immortal Servitude worth using?
You want Immortal Servitude and bump up the number of two-drops. They kill your Blood Artists? Bring them back along with all your other weenies, chump block and sac.
Its gameplay is weird, with lots of synergy and interactions reminiscent of the old Ghost Dad deck. Combos come out of nowhere. One second, you're idling along, playing your mediocre weenies, the next, the opponent is taking 10+ damage.
If you feel like helping me test out, then great. (Just posting this for anyone wanting to try something different)
3 Vault of the Archangel
7 Plains
5 Swamp
4 Isolated Chapel
4 Godless Shrine
4 Blood Artist -- obviously awesome
4 Butcher Ghoul -- combos with blood artist, aristocrat, and thrull
2 Loyal Cathar/Unhallowed Cathar -- because more butcher ghouls are a good thing
4 Nearheath Pilgrim -- super lifelink, combos with guildmage
4 Cartel Aristocrat -- always block, never die, combos with blood artist
4 Thrull Parasite -- additional drain, combos with butcher
4 Vizkopa Guildmage -- finisher, combos with blood artist, vault and blood artist
1 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben -- because why not?
2 Skirsdag High Priest -- "use my incinerate on the blood artist, or this guy?"
4 Immortal Servitude -- if you have two blood artists in GY and several creatures you just autowin if you cast this, nuff said
4 Tragic Slip -- in this deck, best single target removal in T2
//Sideboard
4 Keening Apparition -- anti RIP tech... maybe 4 war priests too? oh, look, both are 2/2 with 2 CMC?
11 ???
Alright, it doesn't really look like much at first, but many of my opponents on MWS have said it's frustrating to play against and they totally underestimated what it can do.
Things to note:
1) Mid and late game, Guildmage combos with Pilgrim, Vault, and Blood Artist for huge damage.
Guildmage+Pilgrim = 4 damage on top of 4 normal damage on top of the lifelink
Guildmage+Vault = Tons of damage
Guildmage+Blood Artist = Tons of damage
2) Thrull Parasite not only gives synergy with Blood Artist, but can remove the counters on Butcher. This gives you additional blocks, and it can be used after raising all of your dudes for an additional sac chump. Example: 2 Blood Artists are in play. Opponent has 10 health. With the Thrull, you can sac one Butcher Ghoul 3 times for a total of 6 damage to the opponent. If you have a Guildmage in play, tap 3 mana to turn that into 12 damage. Or 6 mana for 18 damage.
4) Cartel Aristocrat is a god. He's insanely useful. He makes it hard for weenies to attack, he chumps fatties, he's a nigh-unkillable sac outlet, and he allows you to deal those last few points after you've drained them for a few turns. Also plinks Planeswalkers.
5) In this deck, Tragic Slip is hyper efficient and basically reads "B: Kill target creature".
6) Not much removal it seems. They usually cannot kill your Blood Artist after you recur.
3x Watery Grave
1x Nephalia Drownyard
4x Godless Shine
4x Isolated Chapel
4x Glacial Fortress
4x Drowned Catacomb
4x Blood Artist
4x Cartel Artistocrat
4x High Priest of Penance
4x Butcher Ghoul
4x Vizkopa Guildmage
4x Augus of Bolas
4x Alchemist's Apprentice
4x Screeching Skaab (weakest thing on the list... Snapcaster instead?)
4x Immortal Servitude
Step 1) Play your bears, beat if possible.
Step 2) Stall for as long as you can, doing as much damage as possible. Against control, you can often manage to get an Aristocrat, Blood Artist and Guildmage on the table. If you do, activate Guildmage at EOT to drain them for a lot, then IS on your turn for the win.
Step 3) Failing that, run IS when after you've sacrificed most of your army as speedbumps and they are mostly in the graveyard. If you have a Guildmage on the table, wait until your next turn to drain. If they sweep on their turn, then of course sac everything to Aristocrat.
Activating Aristocrat twice makes a single Blood Artist drain for 3 with each sac. Realistically, expect to activate it once with two BAs on the table. That's still more than enough to kill.
This can go toe-to-toe with tier one decks -- UNTIL they side in hate, that is.
Super fun deck, lots of interactions.
I thought tempo decks were all about speeding up your game while slowing down the opponents? (Read that in an article about Ghost Dad, my favorite deck ever, on the Wizards site)
BTW digging the deck idea, I've been thinking about RUG too for tempo. Although just from looking at this list, it seems like you'll run out of gas unless you go crazy with Druid/Nivmagus... what about adding more beats?
Goal of the database isn't to "win a tournament". It's to provide a free website that will have tons of statistics for every deck/card. To give mtg players an edge in tournaments
I'm a javascript and website developer who has been programming for over 10 years. (I'm 30)
As for the AI, I already have it -- my friend was working on it a long time ago, so he just gave me his code. I made it better, near flawless really, and modified it to play itself and update the MySQL DB with the results of each game.
It plays about 1 million games each day if I just let the program run all day.
I'm just looking for other people who wouldn't mind sharing the workload and helping get this project truly perfect as it's a ton of work for a single person.
Well, about 10 million games can be played every week. The program updates the database with the findings. The purpose is to show "deck X has a Y% win rate against deck Z over a bajillion games".
Can also get card-specific. "Deck X using card Y instead of card Z wins more games overall."
I'm currently working on a program and database website for MTG. The goal of this program is to provide an extremely complex database for MTG cards -- to be specific, the inherent power of each card/deck.
What the program does:
The program will take all available T2 cards and randomly create a deck with them. At first, the decks will be haphazard random piles of junk. The program will have these random piles of junk "duel" each other. The winning deck's cards will be assigned a positive score while the losing cards will be assigned a negative score. Right now, the program is slowly creating its own T2 decks which are vaguely similar to the latest tier 1 decks -- within another two weeks, I am sure the program will end up with decks that are equal to or superior to the pro decks in every way.
In other words, over millions of simulated games, the program will create decks and record the win/loss statistics of each deck. Therefor, players will be able to know which decks currently have the greatest chance of winning, and also, a deck's win percentage against another deck.
Are there any programmers out there interested in helping me with this?