hrmmm.... just a few things to throw out there as i'm still tinkering with my own post rav list...
1) Mana accel- where's it at??? MBC is always and forever going to be a mana hungry deck, and the lists i've seen have at most 2 signets : / I ran both 4xchrome mox and 4xguardian idol in my pre rotation build and never regretted it. Signets are great, and if splashing, then please run 4. If not, then consider Fellwar Stone as a decent substitution.
2) Necroplasm?- Granted, this guy is a little funky, and hard to quantify in an undefined meta, but i have strong feelings that he's gonna do well against weenie hordes. (against control he should prolly be sided out for more fat, and perhaps switched for NoSB against green?)
Just some things to think about/discuss. Will be back when i get a chance to do some decent testing.
I'm not so sure that arashi is overkill exactly... Adding in a sac outlet for your kokushos that happens to be an efficently costed 5/5 beater with the abillity to control the skys is pretty good. Even with arenas, i never seemed to have more than 2-3 cards in my hand for kagemaro in my pre 9th rotation b/g control deck(though that usually became 3-4 with a top in play), and having 2 arashi in hand is only a bad thing if your opponent happens to be playing without flyers.
And about grave-shell scarab.... i'm so not sold on him. In fact... i really don't like him at all. The way ppl have been describing his use really sounds to me like they run him as a 5 cast creature with double green and a black in the casting cost for a 4/4 that regenerates for 3BGG. Yep, he's impossible to get rid of if you have even one mana open, but then you have to recast him, and the potential card advantage is lost. Mebbe in some dredge tech reanimator deck he makes more sense for the late game (bloodbond march?) but not in B/G control.
Please feel free to educate me if i'm wrong, but that's the way i see it
not that i think they transplanted him here, but if this was the plane that Night's Reach deposited Toshi on, that could very well be him, for although the dress is more middle than far eastern, the hairstyle and widow's peak are the same, and he does appear to be blind (white eyes, seems to be leaning on a stick of some sort)
edit: and nothing says survivor more than 10,000 year old vampire...
I can barely stand the wait for 4 copies of dimir machinations.
It only digs 3 card deep and so does top; so top is better and machinations is useless eh? What happens when you've been avoiding land and you now have 3 stacked at the top of your deck from top in a color that lacks good shuffle effects (black)? Well... you now can just remove it all and not have to worry about it later, or if they're threatening land kill you can shuffle it all away till you do need it and grab something youd rather have. I love the synergy between these two cards.
Alternately, it's one of the wonderful premptive ways to get rid of any artifacts your opponent might be playing with (such as that top they just put on their library to draw a card) which is rare in black. And honestly... anytime you can control what your opponent is going to draw (especially if you are say... topping your own draw) you have a chance to swing the game.
This card also kinda makes me wanna put my cranials into the main deck as i'll have a better chance to know what my opponent has in his deck that i want to get rid of (yeah, one copy will be gone already, but at least the first cranial isn't as likely to whiff game 1)
I could keep raving, but i'll stop now and save yer eyes from bleeding
so... i finally gave in and tried playing 2 colors again in a field dominated by tooth and targeted ld... and i'm in love! I built a B/G deck from a G/U build on a whim 30 mins before i went to fnm last week as the deck needed more consistent threats despite feeling fairly solid. My question here is basicly this... how the heck am I gonna deal with the loss of plow??? there is nothing rotating in that even comes close in terms of what it can do for the deck. I've thought about arena as a means of offsetting DC disadvantage and the awesome abillity to choose your favorite 3 of your top 5 or 6 depending on how much mana you have to blow, but the stall provided by plow just seems irreplacable : /
and for the record, 4-2 last week at fnm with only a crazy tooth build that actually ran EVERY tooth target, and mindslaver, beating me sensless, the other loss was to a beacon green deck with a splash of blue for meloku and leaks, and that was a tough match but really could have gone either way. Easy wins over red aggro, some new kid's attempt at white control, white weenie, and a more standard build of tooth.
Yes, I know that Consume was a bad move, and i'm thinking about mebbe putting arenas in the board to try it out in easy matches, I just needed to make sure i had enough life to beat red (hence the nourishes to stiff middle finger about half my meta) which doesn't exactly have high mana requirements, and seems to shrug of plow pretty well. I did have 3 cities in the deck but found that i had plenty of mana fixing already, and usually didn't want the pain bad enough.
Things I learned...
birds... only seem to help against weenie hordes and red (they LOVE to send that burn to the birds instead of my face)
Kagemaro... All Star quality board control (i really underestimated this guy which is sad for a guy that usually only plays mono black)
Arashi... Good versus WW's hordes of flyers from the board, (block ground pounder, tap and kill skyhunter is fun) or the hand, and having this guy in yer hand makes you cry for joy when your opponent activates meloku 5-6 times at the end of your turn.
Working around a resolved tooth is easier when there is no titan in the deck to eat 4 of your lands ( <3 extraction ) whereas a hardcast titan followed by a hardcast collosus or slaver can really ruinate yer day mighty fast.
1)No , but it should be , as a medic I can tell you that tobacco is an evil cancer on society and should be outright illegalised ... No there is no arguement anyone can make for it being a good thing.
I agree, smoking absolutely should be illegal. I say this from the position of a long time smoker who comes from a family of smokers. The sad fact of the matter is that it's not going to happen while the tobacco lobby is so powerful. Mebbe next generation... but, for the current discussion, the only answer is no.
Quote from Belgareth »
2) Who provides them with their profits ?
In many cases, it's the smokers. The 24 hour IHOP where i used to live had a dramatic decrease in profit when they decided to turn the entire restraunt non-smoking, particularly on their evening and night shifts. So much so, that their top servers left to go to work for the Denny's down the street which was never a popular place (a much better place to relax and have a quiet meal), but suddenly was so packed at night that they needed extra help. Other buisinesses which support a large smoking population include bars and night clubs. Irregardless, the wonderful thing about free enterprise is that a store owner can choose who they want to sell to. The smoking ban denies that option to a certain extent. I claim that it is not the government's perrogative to tell a buissines owner that they can't allow someone into their place of buisiness.
God your retarted, the point of the law is to make smoking illegal when it harms other people. Murder is illegal because it harms people, smoking in public places is being made illegal becuase it harms people. Smoking in your own home is not illegal because you are harming no other person. The idea is that smoking doesn't always harm people, the law is prevent the times when it does, while still alowing the times when it doesn't.
If you can continue to argue the logic behind this law then you are a moron. It doesn't matter what the store owner wants because the activity inside his shop is harmful, just like murder is.
BTW, insulting people's intelligence is NOT a good way to get a point across to them....
That said, you are basing your arguments on false claims, and worse, you aren't arguing the point. Never has it been proven that secondhand smoke causes harm to others outside of allergic reactions. For those that are of an age to decide for themselves where they want to be, they are perfectly able to decide to frequent a restraunt that disalows smoking, or has a truly seperate smoking section (outside, or in a room with high powered exhaust fans). For those that suffer unduly from smoke, and are unable to decide for themselves where they want to be, shame on the parents for putting you through it, NOT on the restraunt owner for allowing smoking on the premises. Plus according to your own "logic", you should not be allowed to smoke inside your own home unless you are the only person to live there.
Maybe I can get a petition to make it illegal for people to drive in public, as the exhaust fumes are toxic, can kill you, and are contributing to my being unable to go outside some days due to the pollution being so high.
The government should NOT be able to regulate legal activity in the sense that it makes such activity illegal to please those who find it offensive. Either make smoking illegal and provide treatment for all those who they allowed to become addicted, or butt the hell out of the private establishment's business and let them engage in some good old-fashioned capitalism.
I've tried running dreams decks forever, and really they work much much better with mono black than B/x unless you have access to dark ritual. I do however love the 4 turn clock that comes with seizan and a dreams in play, especially with a shizo around to get seizan past those pesky blockers.
This Deck REALLY likes to see a Kirin in play as it turns most of the deck into millspells, especially with a late game onna or shoal in hand (shoal becomes target opponent mills x+2 cards, and does not need to be cast with the intention of countering a spell, just as long as a spell is on the stack to target). The deck really cries out for more control, but really just a fun little deck that I don't have much time to tinker with.
I'm soooooo happy I was already toying around with a goblin deck for post 9th rotation, so this is great news. I just hope they do indeed errata the other lords as I may have to bring back my old merfolk deck /grin.
LoCoJiN- You missed damping matrix + Guardian Idol And yes I've tried every decent removal spell available to black atm (except laughter), and found that Horobi's Whisper/Dark Banishing sat in my hand too often, and Rend Flesh cost games against alot of the rogue decks, anything running red genju. BiB is one of my favorite removal spells of all time, and the abillity to sac jens/koko/a soon to be useless mana source is great, but at the 4 mana slot I'd rather be playing yukora/NoSB/jens or post sb persecute/extraction depending on what I have in my hand (or if need be what my opponent has on the table) at that point.
. As far as Boseiju, I only own one, and haven't had enough reasons to side it in yet, as most of the blue players around me have too much to counter out of my deck already [arena puts me on card advantage- very bad, NoSB stops Magpie and Meloku- bad, matrix stops shackles and meloku (and adept if they're running it)- bad, and i run alot of creatures (20 including the mana sources), and game 2 i pull out anything bribery will hurt and some creature kill for a slew of things that blue doesn't much care for].
. About pithing needle... does MBC need it? not particularly, however, there are times when damping matrix doesn't do the trick such as vs. lands or enchantments, although admittedly there are few of those that cause problems right now. It can also help narrow the field on what you NEED to extract for sometimes. And as far as whiffing with it? You could whiff with extraction too, but most ppl that can afford to, run it. Sides, that's why it's in the board
Bogan- I believe that 4x consume spirit main is a good thing, but I didn't feel as if my particular version had room (I kept pulling them out, 1 at a time through the various revisions). 4x arena feels like a tad bit of overkill for me though, I rarely want more than one out at a time, and my 2nd/3rd drawn arena usually ends up on a mox or as pitch food for a shoal.
I know some people are gonna look at this and think I'm nuts because of all the antisynergistic things in the deck, but it actually works quite well. The things I run that shut down other things in my deck aren't gonna hit the board unless they're gonna hurt my opponent more than me (which is pretty much all the time). Otherwise they're usually shoal/mox food. The main deck is very flexible, and has enough options in it that the opponent doesn't always make the right decisions trying to defend against it.
Latest modifications to the deck are dropping 2xGreater Harvest for 1 consume spirit and the token ink eyes. I used to run Lightning Greaves in damping matrix's slot which made harvester playable, but lately I've been using him 95% of the time for mox/shoal food.
The reminders in the sideboard are more or less placeholders at the moment, but useful ones as I run into a fair amount of black decks, and it is one of my weakest matchups. When I get off my lazy butt and get another extraction, that will replace one, and for the other 3, I'm thinking about another Boseiju, another distress or extraction, and another consume, though those 3 will become Pithing Needle once saviors becomes legal.
@those using bauble for mana accel, I can't really see them being as effective as mox/idol. Yes, they're a first turn play, yes they thin your deck(which is wonderful, but I fell it's less important to this archetype than mana accel, especially if you're running arena), but they don't really seem to fit the deck's curve very well. Most of the spells you'll want to accelerate into are 4cc, and bauble doesn't get you there unless you have it out turn 1. Whereas mox/idol allows those devastating spells to be cast turn 2 or 3, and things like turn 2 damping matrix, or turn 3 kokusho are murder vs alot of opponents. Also, I'd usually prefer spending 2 mana to chump block/ chip away at my opponent's life than pull a land into play.
A reverse microwave oven (evaworcim- notice the similarity to evalongoria) - get those 12 packs cold within seconds, cool down that bowl of soup that sat on the stove till it scalds your face.
hrm... nice as that is, mebbe i should throw in this nightvision digital camcorder, and the month of june (if may is now darksteel, perhaps june should be underpants?)
Hrm... I'm sorely tempted to get a pair or three of these into my sideboard. I run mbc with maindeck damping matrix (friggin wonderful card, and worth losing my guardian idols as creatures) but there are times when it might be nice to shut down certain lands/enchantments with something other than extraction.
1) Mana accel- where's it at??? MBC is always and forever going to be a mana hungry deck, and the lists i've seen have at most 2 signets : / I ran both 4xchrome mox and 4xguardian idol in my pre rotation build and never regretted it. Signets are great, and if splashing, then please run 4. If not, then consider Fellwar Stone as a decent substitution.
2) Necroplasm?- Granted, this guy is a little funky, and hard to quantify in an undefined meta, but i have strong feelings that he's gonna do well against weenie hordes. (against control he should prolly be sided out for more fat, and perhaps switched for NoSB against green?)
Just some things to think about/discuss. Will be back when i get a chance to do some decent testing.
And about grave-shell scarab.... i'm so not sold on him. In fact... i really don't like him at all. The way ppl have been describing his use really sounds to me like they run him as a 5 cast creature with double green and a black in the casting cost for a 4/4 that regenerates for 3BGG. Yep, he's impossible to get rid of if you have even one mana open, but then you have to recast him, and the potential card advantage is lost. Mebbe in some dredge tech reanimator deck he makes more sense for the late game (bloodbond march?) but not in B/G control.
Please feel free to educate me if i'm wrong, but that's the way i see it
edit: and nothing says survivor more than 10,000 year old vampire...
It only digs 3 card deep and so does top; so top is better and machinations is useless eh? What happens when you've been avoiding land and you now have 3 stacked at the top of your deck from top in a color that lacks good shuffle effects (black)? Well... you now can just remove it all and not have to worry about it later, or if they're threatening land kill you can shuffle it all away till you do need it and grab something youd rather have. I love the synergy between these two cards.
Alternately, it's one of the wonderful premptive ways to get rid of any artifacts your opponent might be playing with (such as that top they just put on their library to draw a card) which is rare in black. And honestly... anytime you can control what your opponent is going to draw (especially if you are say... topping your own draw) you have a chance to swing the game.
This card also kinda makes me wanna put my cranials into the main deck as i'll have a better chance to know what my opponent has in his deck that i want to get rid of (yeah, one copy will be gone already, but at least the first cranial isn't as likely to whiff game 1)
I could keep raving, but i'll stop now and save yer eyes from bleeding
and for the record, 4-2 last week at fnm with only a crazy tooth build that actually ran EVERY tooth target, and mindslaver, beating me sensless, the other loss was to a beacon green deck with a splash of blue for meloku and leaks, and that was a tough match but really could have gone either way. Easy wins over red aggro, some new kid's attempt at white control, white weenie, and a more standard build of tooth.
10x Forest
1x Okina, temple to the Grandfathers
9x swamp
1x Shizo, Death's Storehouse
Creatures
4x Birds of Paradise
4x Sakura Tribe Elder
4x Eternal Witness
3x Arashi, the Sky Asunder
3x Kagemaro, First to Suffer
4x Kokusho, the Evening Star
3x Sensei's Divining Top
4x Naturalize
3x Kodama's Reach
3x Plow Under
3x Barter in Blood
3x Death Cloud
4x Nourish
3x Troll Ascetic
4x Cranial Extraction
1x Death Cloud
3x Consume Spirit
Yes, I know that Consume was a bad move, and i'm thinking about mebbe putting arenas in the board to try it out in easy matches, I just needed to make sure i had enough life to beat red (hence the nourishes to stiff middle finger about half my meta) which doesn't exactly have high mana requirements, and seems to shrug of plow pretty well. I did have 3 cities in the deck but found that i had plenty of mana fixing already, and usually didn't want the pain bad enough.
Things I learned...
birds... only seem to help against weenie hordes and red (they LOVE to send that burn to the birds instead of my face)
Kagemaro... All Star quality board control (i really underestimated this guy which is sad for a guy that usually only plays mono black)
Arashi... Good versus WW's hordes of flyers from the board, (block ground pounder, tap and kill skyhunter is fun) or the hand, and having this guy in yer hand makes you cry for joy when your opponent activates meloku 5-6 times at the end of your turn.
Working around a resolved tooth is easier when there is no titan in the deck to eat 4 of your lands ( <3 extraction ) whereas a hardcast titan followed by a hardcast collosus or slaver can really ruinate yer day mighty fast.
2) Who do resturants and bars really belong do?
I agree, smoking absolutely should be illegal. I say this from the position of a long time smoker who comes from a family of smokers. The sad fact of the matter is that it's not going to happen while the tobacco lobby is so powerful. Mebbe next generation... but, for the current discussion, the only answer is no.
In many cases, it's the smokers. The 24 hour IHOP where i used to live had a dramatic decrease in profit when they decided to turn the entire restraunt non-smoking, particularly on their evening and night shifts. So much so, that their top servers left to go to work for the Denny's down the street which was never a popular place (a much better place to relax and have a quiet meal), but suddenly was so packed at night that they needed extra help. Other buisinesses which support a large smoking population include bars and night clubs. Irregardless, the wonderful thing about free enterprise is that a store owner can choose who they want to sell to. The smoking ban denies that option to a certain extent. I claim that it is not the government's perrogative to tell a buissines owner that they can't allow someone into their place of buisiness.
BTW, insulting people's intelligence is NOT a good way to get a point across to them....
That said, you are basing your arguments on false claims, and worse, you aren't arguing the point. Never has it been proven that secondhand smoke causes harm to others outside of allergic reactions. For those that are of an age to decide for themselves where they want to be, they are perfectly able to decide to frequent a restraunt that disalows smoking, or has a truly seperate smoking section (outside, or in a room with high powered exhaust fans). For those that suffer unduly from smoke, and are unable to decide for themselves where they want to be, shame on the parents for putting you through it, NOT on the restraunt owner for allowing smoking on the premises. Plus according to your own "logic", you should not be allowed to smoke inside your own home unless you are the only person to live there.
Maybe I can get a petition to make it illegal for people to drive in public, as the exhaust fumes are toxic, can kill you, and are contributing to my being unable to go outside some days due to the pollution being so high.
The government should NOT be able to regulate legal activity in the sense that it makes such activity illegal to please those who find it offensive. Either make smoking illegal and provide treatment for all those who they allowed to become addicted, or butt the hell out of the private establishment's business and let them engage in some good old-fashioned capitalism.
22x Island
1x Minamo, School at Water's Edge
3x Kami of the Crescent Moon
4x Shape Stealer
3x Kira, Great Glass Spinner
2x Kiri-Onna
3x Cloudhoof Kirin
4x Keiga, the Tide Star
4x Dampen Thought
3x Twincast
3x Quash
3x Traumatize
2x Disrupting Shoal
This Deck REALLY likes to see a Kirin in play as it turns most of the deck into millspells, especially with a late game onna or shoal in hand (shoal becomes target opponent mills x+2 cards, and does not need to be cast with the intention of countering a spell, just as long as a spell is on the stack to target). The deck really cries out for more control, but really just a fun little deck that I don't have much time to tinker with.
. As far as Boseiju, I only own one, and haven't had enough reasons to side it in yet, as most of the blue players around me have too much to counter out of my deck already [arena puts me on card advantage- very bad, NoSB stops Magpie and Meloku- bad, matrix stops shackles and meloku (and adept if they're running it)- bad, and i run alot of creatures (20 including the mana sources), and game 2 i pull out anything bribery will hurt and some creature kill for a slew of things that blue doesn't much care for].
. About pithing needle... does MBC need it? not particularly, however, there are times when damping matrix doesn't do the trick such as vs. lands or enchantments, although admittedly there are few of those that cause problems right now. It can also help narrow the field on what you NEED to extract for sometimes. And as far as whiffing with it? You could whiff with extraction too, but most ppl that can afford to, run it. Sides, that's why it's in the board
Bogan- I believe that 4x consume spirit main is a good thing, but I didn't feel as if my particular version had room (I kept pulling them out, 1 at a time through the various revisions). 4x arena feels like a tad bit of overkill for me though, I rarely want more than one out at a time, and my 2nd/3rd drawn arena usually ends up on a mox or as pitch food for a shoal.
3x Yukora, the Prisoner
3x Solemn Simulacrum
1x Ink-Eyes Servant of Oni
3x Damping Matrix
3x Night of Souls' Betrayal
3x Echoing Decay
3x Sickening Shoal
3x Devour in Shadow
2x Death Cloud
3x Phyrexian Arena
2x Consume Spirit
1x Shizo, Death's Storehouse
2x Stalking Stones
4x Blinkmoth Nexus
15x Swamp
4x Chrome Mox
3x Guardian Idol
1x Boseiju, Who Shelters All
1x Death Cloud
1x Consume Spirit
3x Persecute
3x Distress
2x Cranial Extraction
4x Grim Reminder
I know some people are gonna look at this and think I'm nuts because of all the antisynergistic things in the deck, but it actually works quite well. The things I run that shut down other things in my deck aren't gonna hit the board unless they're gonna hurt my opponent more than me (which is pretty much all the time). Otherwise they're usually shoal/mox food. The main deck is very flexible, and has enough options in it that the opponent doesn't always make the right decisions trying to defend against it.
Latest modifications to the deck are dropping 2xGreater Harvest for 1 consume spirit and the token ink eyes. I used to run Lightning Greaves in damping matrix's slot which made harvester playable, but lately I've been using him 95% of the time for mox/shoal food.
The reminders in the sideboard are more or less placeholders at the moment, but useful ones as I run into a fair amount of black decks, and it is one of my weakest matchups. When I get off my lazy butt and get another extraction, that will replace one, and for the other 3, I'm thinking about another Boseiju, another distress or extraction, and another consume, though those 3 will become Pithing Needle once saviors becomes legal.
@those using bauble for mana accel, I can't really see them being as effective as mox/idol. Yes, they're a first turn play, yes they thin your deck(which is wonderful, but I fell it's less important to this archetype than mana accel, especially if you're running arena), but they don't really seem to fit the deck's curve very well. Most of the spells you'll want to accelerate into are 4cc, and bauble doesn't get you there unless you have it out turn 1. Whereas mox/idol allows those devastating spells to be cast turn 2 or 3, and things like turn 2 damping matrix, or turn 3 kokusho are murder vs alot of opponents. Also, I'd usually prefer spending 2 mana to chump block/ chip away at my opponent's life than pull a land into play.
A reverse microwave oven (evaworcim- notice the similarity to evalongoria) - get those 12 packs cold within seconds, cool down that bowl of soup that sat on the stove till it scalds your face.
hrm... nice as that is, mebbe i should throw in this nightvision digital camcorder, and the month of june (if may is now darksteel, perhaps june should be underpants?)